Sacrifice and Creation in the Paintings of Rothko

The dramatic paintings of Mark Rothko (1903-1970), born to a Jewish familyin Russia and one of the most outstanding artists of the New York School, offer an extraordinary example of the expression of religious emotion in the second half of the 20^th century. Inspired by Classical art and the great cycles of mediaeval Italian religious painting, Rothko embarked upon a path of disfiguring the image until it was totally eliminated, leading him to the creation of the dark pictures of the final years of his life. In this essay we look at the way in which the morphological transformations of Rothko's art run parallel to the ritual processes of archaic religion as well as the extent to which pure abstraction can be understood as a path for aesthetic and mystical surrender in an art form that is not explicitly religious. Analysis of the paintings is accompanied by a commentary and interpretation of the numerous texts that Rothko wrote about matters pertaining to art and religion, and which open up new and surprising approaches to the study of the sacred.