One of the more unexpected achievements of the second Trump administration has been an efflorescence of abstract art. Last year the State Department announced Alma Allen, whose sculptures are informed by the landscapes and geology of the Americas, as the US representative at the 2026 Venice Biennale. And last week, an attempt to repaint the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C. ‘American flag blue’ evolved into a touching tribute to Mark Rothko. An enormous bloom of algae, thriving on the conditions introduced by the resurfacing of the pool, made the 600m-long water body resemble a colour field painting. The single-celled organisms had arranged themselves, it would appear, into an homage to Green, Blue, Green on Blue (1968).
It is interesting to see a president who promised to ‘drain the swamp’ helping to create a small bayou within walking distance of the White House. But, in another instance of politics becoming impervious to satire, the company that the Trump administration enlisted to install a water-purification system in the Reflecting Pool – no competing bids admitted – is called Greenwater Services.
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has seemed even more Rothkovian than the existing Rothko reflecting pool – that is, the pool designed by Philip Johnson that sits opposite the Rothko Chapel in Houston, created to house a series of 14 black abstract paintings by the artist. Just as the reflecting pool in the capital bears the image of the Lincoln Memorial, the chapel pool reflects Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk (1963–67), an eight-metre-high monument to Martin Luther King, Jr. Whereas the pool in D.C. has become the site of what, from afar, looks like an artistic intervention, in 2018 ‘white pride’ activists spilled white paint into the Rothko Chapel pool and near the entrance to the chapel. The evidence is mounting that some of us, when faced with a reflecting pool, decline the invitation to reflect on our own behaviour.
Still, Rakewell tries to see the best in people. Rothko seems the most obvious inspiration for those in charge of renovating the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, but they might also have been paying tribute to Monet’s Water Lilies of 1915; or to one of Miles Davis’s best-loved pieces, ‘Blue in Green’.
Perhaps the chief inspiration is both musical and visual? In 1993 the producers of the long-running soap EastEnders made the colour of the Thames in the famous opening credits green rather than blue, perhaps to better reflect the river’s true colour. Since 2009, however, the river has been a bright blue. If the Thames can change colour at the whim of a title designer, and the City of Paris can clean up the Seine so thoroughly that the public can swim in it, then surely there’s hope for the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to return to its healthy blue state once again. Until then, Rakewell will be playing New Order’s ‘Everything’s Gone Green’ on repeat.
