Rothko, in Pain and Glory

The New York Times

By Lyna Bentahar

Nov. 4, 2023

You may recognize Mark Rothko’s paintings, even if you can’t recall the artist’s name: tall canvases of bold, floating blocks of color. Their titles, such as “No. 13,” “Red on Maroon,” even “Untitled,” are just as abstract as the paintings themselves.

The Foundation Louis Vuitton art museum in Paris will host 115 of Rothko’s works in a blockbuster retrospective that runs through next spring. The exhibition, which fills four floors, proceeds in a somewhat chronological order. Paintings of city scenery from Rothko’s early career lead to his experiments with Surrealism; to the abstract, foggy rectangles he’s known for; and finally to the dark, colorless canvasses that embodied his later work.

“Over and over, in soft-edged blocks layered on filmy backgrounds, he modeled a commitment to abstraction that charged at the hardest questions of life and art through refusal of the easy path,” my colleague Jason Farago, an art critic for The Times, writes in his review of the retrospective.

Rothko preferred to show his paintings in low light, and away from the work of other artists. The show mostly stays true to those wishes, though it gives space in the final gallery to one artist Rothko at least approved of: Alberto Giacometti, whose spindly, bronze sculptures of attenuated human figures appear alongside a set of Rothko’s black-and-gray paintings.

The retrospective is a success, Jason says, though he notes that one can only view so many Rothkos in a day before they start to merge together. “They are spectacular, even if they soon all became broadly similar,” he writes.

And there’s more to appreciate about this show then just the paintings — particularly, the ordeal of getting them all to Paris.

No museum has attempted a Rothko exhibition of this scale since the 1990s, and for good reason: Almost none could afford it. The paintings are not just expensive (one was up for sale for $40 million last month), but also difficult to move because of the fragile materials Rothko used in his paint.

Moving so many Rothkos safely is something perhaps only a billionaire could afford. As it happens, the Louis Vuitton conglomerate’s chief executive, Bernard Arnault, is one of the richest people in the world.

“In organizational terms,” Jason writes, “this show is a milestone.”

If a trip to the Vuitton in Paris is out of reach, there are opportunities to see Rothko’s work in the United States. The National Gallery of Art in Washington is holding an exhibition of Rothko’s paintings on paper starting November 19. The Phillips Collection, also in Washington, is hosting an installation through the end of March. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has its own Rothko collection. And in Houston there is a permanent installation in a nondenominational church, aptly called The Rothko Chapel.