An enormous yet sincere painting. A seemingly simple yet deeply profound style. Mark Rothko (1903-1970) was an American painter celebrated for contrasts. Among the great masters of abstract expressionism, he stood with Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Across a long career, he forged a highly personal, unmistakable pictorial language. A sustained retrospective offers key insights into Rothko’s work, including a focused look at the Louis Vuitton Foundation’s tribute to his art.
Set in the forested Boulogne area west of Paris, this important private cultural institution hosts the exhibition until early April. The show spans 115 works and marks one of the most expansive Rothko presentations in France in recent years. It gathers pieces from major American museums and private collections, highlighting Rothko’s stature as a leading artist of the latter half of the 20th century. The fall and winter season in Paris benefits from such a substantial survey that stands out in the French capital’s cultural calendar.
Seventy years after his artistic peak, Rothko’s abstract paintings command attention and admiration. Critics once distrusted them. A 1950 New York Times review described a Mondrian-like impact and the abandonment of explicit lines and contours, contrasting Rothko with early pioneers of pictorial abstraction. The assessment mirrored a broader conversation about his innovative path.
“Removing all obstacles”
One pivotal moment in Rothko’s career was his move away from human figuration and any attempt to imitate reality. In 1949 he explained in Tiger’s Eye that his aim was to eliminate barriers between the artist and the viewer, between idea and perception. This shift pushed him toward abstraction, though decades of apprenticeship preceded his mature style. The Paris retrospective makes that evolution clearly visible.
Born in 1903 into a Jewish family, Rothko lived in Dvinsk, then part of the Russian Empire (today Latvia). He emigrated to the United States at age ten and began studies at Yale University, though he soon left to pursue art in New York. The first rooms of the exhibition focus on his 1930s paintings, where he, influenced by Matisse, sought to depict New York modernity in a figurative and expressionist register. “I belong to a generation that cares deeply about the human figure, but the figure does not serve my needs, and when I represent it, I feel a restraint,” Rothko once wrote.
Rothko’s early works felt otherworldly. After that initial phase, he devoted himself to art in the following decade, weaving symbolism with surrealist currents that were fashionable at the time. The show includes works such as Antigone (1941) and The Sacrifice of Iphigenia (1942). While these pieces might not stand out today, they reveal a mind already testing ideas that would later define his abstract practice, including written reflections on art.
What stands out is how Rothko, even while drawing on influences, displayed traits that would characterize his later abstract language. There is a notable facility for technique that can feel smoky and atmospheric—the seeds of a singular visual atmosphere that would come to define him.
A unique yet universal painting language
From the 1950s onward, Rothko fully embraced abstraction. He produced dozens of large-scale works featuring two or three horizontal rectangles on fields of gently shifting color. These canvases grew in size and became monumental, often without titles. The Louis Vuitton Foundation’s collection includes a broad representative view of this period, which experts classify as the artist’s classical phase. Rothko himself preferred art to speak for itself, avoiding commentary and letting viewers engage directly with the work.
Paintings for the Four Seasons
“I imprisoned the most absolute violence in every centimeter of its surface,” Rothko wrote, capturing the tension of Apollonian order versus Dionysian ecstasy. During this period he also absorbed existential thought from the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, a regular reader of Rothko’s. Rather than chasing formal originality, the artist sought to probe the human condition. His paintings resemble pictorial music, inviting contemplation for both believing minds and sensitive souls.
The exhibition also reveals changes within that classical phase, including rooms devoted to monumental works imagined for a New York restaurant experience. Later shown in a different room at the Tate Modern in London, these pieces prompted comparisons with British painter J. M. W. Turner, admired by American audiences.
These canvases feature stark black verticals and variations of deep red and burgundy. They stand among the strongest in the exhibition and form another room of abstractions in black and brown. These works signal Rothko’s ability to communicate through a universal pictorial language. A true genius whose impact remains visible in Paris until early April.