“Silence is so accurate”: Mark Rothko’s Emotionally Expressive Art

When you see a painting by Mark Rothko, I’m sure you fall to your knees in admiration, thinking, “Wow, what a masterpiece — I’d easily drop a million dollars to bring that home with me.” Right?

Or perhaps, like many of us less “sophisticated” beings, you may instead wonder, “Dang, that sold for more than a million dollars? I’m definitely in the wrong profession.”

I mean, what is this thing? What was he trying to paint? It just seems like blocks of color — and muddy blocks of color at that.

(*By the way, in case you are wondering, yes, the above painting really did sell for over one million dollars.)

As was the case for so many modern artists from 1900–1950’s, Rothko wasn’t painting a particular “thing” per se; his art instead follows the style of Abstract Expressionism, meaning that what you see on the canvas represents a concept, a feeling, an emotion, etc. However, Rothko did not identify himself with other “abstractionists”, focusing more on the importance of emotional communication:

“I am not an abstractionist… I am not interested in the relationships of color or form or anything else.. .I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on — and the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures show that I communicate those basic human emotions… The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I…