Untitled, 1949 Mark Rothko, who was central to the development of postwar abstract painting in the United States, is best known for the luminous paintings he made in the 1950s and 1960s. These classic works are characterized by their soft-edged rectangular forms and broad, thin ...Untitled, 1949 Mark Rothko, who was central to the development of postwar abstract painting in the United States, is best known for the luminous paintings he made in the 1950s and 1960s. These classic works are characterized by their soft-edged rectangular forms and broad, thin washes of color.
Rothko worked on large canvases, but he felt that the scale was intimate, establishing a close physical relationship with the viewer. Mark Rothko, one of the preeminent modern artists of his generation, said that the subject matter of his paintings was the extremes of human emotion. During a career that spanned five decades, Rothko (American, b.
Russia, 1903–1970) developed an innovative form of abstract painting characterized by rigorous attention to formal elements such as color, shape, balance, depth, composition, and scale. His early stylistic experimentation distilled into the Abstract Expressionism of his mature work—large-scale paintings featuring rectangular shapes of saturated color and shimmering emotional presence. By the late 1940s, when the devastation of a global war had shunted creative impulses into radically new directions, Rothko was an established and influential leader among New York’s artistic avant-garde.