Mark Rothko was yet another young death.............66......................is still fairly young in the 70s......

While in Europe, the Rothkos traveled to Rome, Florence, Venice and Pompeii. In Florence, he visited Michelangelo's Laurentian Library, to see first-hand the library's vestibule, from which he drew further inspiration for the murals.^[66] He remarked that the "room had exactly the feeling that I wanted....it gives the visitor the feeling of being caught in a room with the doors and windows walled-in shut." Further he was influenced by the somber colors of the murals in the Pompeiian Villa of the Mysteries.^[67] Following the trip to Italy, the Rothkos voyaged to Paris,Brussels, Antwerp and Amsterdam, before returning to the United States.

Once back in New York, Rothko and wife Mell visited the near-completed Four Seasons restaurant. Upset with the restaurant's dining atmosphere, which he considered pretentious and inappropriate for the display of his works, Rothko refused to continue the project and returned his cash advance to the Seagram and Sons Company. Seagram had intended to honor Rothko's emergence to prominence through his selection, and his breach of contract and public expression of outrage were unexpected.

Rothko kept the commissioned paintings in storage until 1968. Given that Rothko had known in advance about the luxury decor of the restaurant and the social class of its future patrons, the motives for his abrupt repudiation remain mysterious. A temperamental personality, Rothko never fully explained his conflicted emotions over the incident.^[68] One reading is offered by his biographer, James E.B. Breslin: the Seagram project could be seen as an acting-out of a familiar, in this case self-created "drama of trust and betrayal, of advancing into the world, then withdrawing, angrily, from it....He was an Isaac who at the last moment refused to yield to Abraham."^[69] The final series of Seagram Murals was dispersed and now hangs in three locations: London's Tate Modern, Japan’s Kawamura Memorial Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.^[70]

In October 2012, Black on Maroon, one of the paintings in the Seagram series, was defaced with writing in black ink while on display at Tate Modern, by a man named Wlodzimierz Umaniec. Restoration of the painting took eighteen months to complete. The BBC's Arts Editor Will Gompertz explained that the ink from Umaniec's marker pen had bled all the way through the canvas, causing "a deep wound not a superficial graze" and that the vandal had caused "significant damage."^[71]