CAM Talk – Exhibition Series: Mark Rothko’s “Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea,” by Dr. Thomas Crow

Saturday, August 8, 2026 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Downtown Campus Auditorium 27 Pleasant Street, Gloucester, MA 01930 Registration Required This lecture will be recorded. Ticketing Options: Individual Lecture Tickets — SOLD OUT CAM Members $5, Non-Members (Adult) $30. Additional prices available when registering. Tickets do not include admission to the special exhibition. Exhibition Lecture Series Package Tickets — SOLD OUT CAM Members $25, Non-Members (Adult) $100. Additional prices available when registering. Tickets include five lectures and admission to the special exhibition after the talk on July 22. Click here to become a member and save! The large canvas of 1944 that Mark Rothko titled Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea appears at first encounter like a belated example of international Surrealism. While not wrong, that view fails to comprehend the outsized role this painting played in the artist’s reaching the signature abstract style for which he is so renowned. This lecture will show how much of that evolution is already prefigured in this dreamlike aquatic vision. Dr. Thomas Crow teaches graduate students in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, where he is Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art. His most recent publication is Murder in the Rue Marat: A Case of Art in Revolution (Princeton University Press). He is also co-editor of Seeing Rothko, the proceedings of the conference he organized when director of the Getty Research Institute. Image Credit: Mark Rothko (1903–1970), Iphigenia and the Sea/Horizontal Phantasy, 1943. Oil on canvas. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.