Art · 20th century
1903–1970 · Latvian-born American
Abstract Expressionism — Colour Field painting
Mark Rothko was the great tragedian of American abstraction. From 1949 until his death he painted almost nothing but stacked, soft-edged rectangles of colour hovering on a luminous ground, canvases he wanted hung low and seen close so that the viewer stood inside them. He insisted the subject was not colour but basic human emotion — tragedy, ecstasy and doom.
Nine dark maroon and black panels painted for a Manhattan restaurant, whose fee the artist returned before giving them to a London gallery (1958)
Tate Modern, London
The Seagram murals — commissioned for the Four Seasons in the Seagram Building, withdrawn in 1960 and given to the Tate
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
A black rectangle over a maroon ground, defaced with graffiti ink by a vandal in 2012 and restored after eighteen months (1958)
Tate Modern, London
One of the Seagram panels; the vandal was jailed for two years
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
An octagonal building in Houston hung with fourteen near-black canvases, built for the de Menil family as a place of meditation (1971)
Houston, Texas
The Rothko Chapel, opened a year after the artist's death; Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk stands outside
Image: David Van Horn from Boston, MA, USA · CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons
Bands of orange, red and yellow stacked on a glowing ground; it fetched $86.9 million in 2012 (1961)
Private collection
At the time the highest price paid at auction for a post-war work of art
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A pale band floating between pink and lavender on rose, once owned by David Rockefeller and sold in 2007 for $72.8 million (1950)
Private collection
White Center — one of the classic canvases of his breakthrough years
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
Rust and blue bands hovering above one another, a signature canvas of the Los Angeles collection (1953)
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Also known as Brown, Blue, Brown on Blue
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia