Rothko: When colour becomes prayer

01The exile who painted silence

Markuss Rotkovičs was born in 1903 in a small town in the Russian Empire, now Daugavpils in Latvia. His childhood was marked by two things: fear and books. Fear, because antisemitic pogroms raged, forcing his family to flee to America in 1913. Books, because his father, a pharmacist, instilled in him an early love for sacred texts—the Torah, Greek tragedies, German philosophers. By the age of ten, he spoke four languages. By twenty, he had dropped out of Yale, disgusted by the elitism of American universities. What saved him was New York—its dark alleys, its artists’ studios, and this stubborn conviction: the world needed a new form of the sacred.

In the 1930s, Rothko painted urban scenes in a style close to social realism. Anonymous faces, hurried crowds, packed subways. Nothing hinted at the artist he would become. Yet beneath these seemingly ordinary canvases, something was at work. An obsession with space, with how light could transform a surface into a gateway to infinity. In 1940, he officially changed his name to Mark Rothko. As if, by erasing his origins, he could better transcend them.

02The revelation of formless forms

Everything changed in 1947. Rothko abandoned figuration for good. No more characters, no more stories. Just floating shapes, coloured masses emerging from a primordial haze. His painter friends, like Adolph Gottlieb, called them "multiforms." He would later simply describe them as "landscapes of the soul."

To understand this rupture, you have to imagine postwar America. A country haunted by the atomic bomb, by concentration camps, by the fear of annihilation. New York artists were searching for an answer. Jackson Pollock found it in gesture, in the physical trace of paint splattered across the canvas. Rothko found it in silence. In these rectangles that represented nothing, yet contained everything: birth, death, ecstasy, terror.

His canvases from this period resemble windows open onto another world. Deep blues evoking the ocean, reds burning like embers, yellows radiating like divine light. But beware: these colours were never pure. Rothko mixed them, layered them, made them vibrate until they became living entities. A red was never just red. It was a red that bled, that breathed, that watched you.

03The studio as sanctuary

Step into Rothko’s studio, and you’ll understand why his paintings have this particular aura. It was a cramped, almost claustrophobic space in an industrial building in New York’s Bowery. The windows were blacked out. Light came from a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. Rothko worked in near-darkness, like a monk in his cell. He didn’t paint with brushes, but with wide brooms, wielded with ceremonial slowness.

What struck visitors was the silence. No music, no conversation. Just the scrape of the brush against the canvas, the sound of paint spreading, thick and viscous. Rothko used industrial pigments—cadmium reds, ultramarine blues, ivory blacks—which he mixed with linseed oil and sometimes beeswax to achieve that velvety, almost tactile texture. He applied the paint in successive layers, sometimes up to twenty, letting each dry before adding the next. The result? Surfaces that seemed to breathe, that shifted with the angle of light, with the viewer’s mood.

One day, a visitor asked him why he painted rectangles. Rothko replied: "Because it’s the most primitive form. The most archaic. Like a door, like an altar, like a coffin." Then, after a pause, he added: "And because I have no choice."

04Colour as a physical experience

Look at a Rothko canvas up close, and you’ll see only paint. Brushstrokes, impasto, areas where the colour seems to have dripped. Step back a few paces, and suddenly, the magic happens. The shapes detach from the background, float in space, draw you in. It’s an almost physical experience, as if the canvas were enveloping you, absorbing you.

Rothko knew exactly what he was doing. His paintings were designed to be seen from a distance, to dominate the space. The largest measure nearly three metres high—enough to make the viewer feel small, vulnerable. Enough for colour to become a presence, almost a living entity.

Take Orange and Yellow (1956), one of his most famous works. At first glance, it’s simple: two orange rectangles against a yellow background. But look longer. The upper orange seems more intense, as if radiating downward. The lower one, darker, appears to sink into the canvas. Between them, a thin strip of yellow vibrates, like a border between two worlds. Some see a sunset. Others, a meditation on duality. Rothko himself rejected all interpretation. "If all you see are shapes and colours," he said, "then I’ve failed."

05The Seagram Murals scandal

In 1958, Rothko accepted a commission that would haunt him until his death: decorating the Four Seasons restaurant in New York’s Seagram Building. The place was frequented by the financial elite, businessmen, the powerful. Rothko, who despised money and those who wielded it, saw an opportunity to play a trick on them.

For months, he worked in his studio, creating a series of dark, oppressive canvases. Black rectangles against brown backgrounds, like doors to the void. When he finally installed them in the restaurant, the effect was striking. Diners, used to linen tablecloths and crystal chandeliers, found themselves facing walls that seemed to judge them. Some complained. Others fled. Rothko savoured his victory. "I got them," he told his friends. Shortly after, he withdrew the paintings and broke the contract.

Today, the Seagram Murals are scattered across museums worldwide. At London’s Tate Modern, they occupy an entire room, bathed in dim light. Visitors sit on benches, contemplating these black rectangles floating in the darkness. Some weep. Others remain silent, as if before a tomb. Rothko wanted his paintings to "destroy appetite." Mission accomplished.

06The chapel where God is a colour

In 1964, collectors John and Dominique de Menil proposed a daring project: creating a sacred, non-denominational space where art would replace dogma. Rothko accepted immediately. For three years, he worked tirelessly, producing fourteen monumental canvases in shades of brown, violet, and black. Colours that absorbed light, enveloping the visitor like a shroud.

The Rothko Chapel, inaugurated in 1971 in Houston, is a unique place in the world. An octagonal room with bare walls, lit by a skylight that shifts with the hours. The paintings, arranged in triptychs and individual panels, create an atmosphere both solemn and intimate. Some visitors pray. Others meditate. Many simply sit, absorbed by these dark rectangles that seem to contain all the world’s suffering and beauty.

Rothko never saw the completed chapel. In February 1970, he took his own life in his New York studio, leaving behind hundreds of unfinished canvases. His final works were almost entirely black, as if he had wanted to erase all trace of colour, light, life. Yet in that darkness, something persists. A glimmer, a presence. Proof that transcendence needs no figures, no narratives, no dogmas. Just colour, silence, and a viewer willing to be carried away.

07The legacy of a painter who refused to be understood

Today, Rothko’s paintings sell for tens of millions of dollars. Museums compete for them. Collectors fight to own a "real Rothko." Yet the man who painted them would have hated it. He rejected labels, categories, ready-made interpretations. "I’m not an abstract painter," he said. "I’m not interested in the relationships between forms and colours. I’m only interested in expressing fundamental human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom."

Perhaps that’s why his work still moves us, more than fifty years after his death. Because it doesn’t seek to please, to seduce, to explain. Because it demands that the viewer make an effort, accept being lost, being overwhelmed. Because it reminds us that art, at its highest level, is not decoration, but an experience. A wordless prayer, a mantra-less meditation, a door open to the invisible.

The next time you stand before a Rothko painting, don’t try to understand it. Just let the colour carry you. Close your eyes, then open them again. And ask yourself: what do I feel? The answer, perhaps, lies there—in that bleeding red rectangle, in that black swallowing the light. Maybe that’s what transcendence is. Not an idea, not a concept. Just a colour that becomes prayer.