Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko was a Latvian-born American painter and a central figure of Abstract Expressionism, best known for the color field paintings he produced from about 1949 onward, large canvases built from soft-edged rectangular blocks of luminous, layered color. He intended these works less as formal exercises than as vehicles for direct emotional and spiritual experience, an ambition that culminated in his late-career mural cycle for the Rothko Chapel in Houston, which he considered his most important artistic statement. Rothko's paintings, prized for the intensity of feeling produced through pure color relationships alone, now rank among the most highly valued works of postwar American art.