Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko is known for the hovering, shimmering fields of color in his mature paintings. In his early works of the 1930s, including works made under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, Rothko explored Social Realist themes. By the early 1940s, he was exploring Surrealism as well as mythic and so-called primitive art. By the end of that decade, Rothko had rejected the representational subject matter of Surrealism and arrived at his mature style.

The color fields of White Center reflect Rothko's fascination with the emotional and visual power of the color red, which dominates his canvases of the 1950s and 1960s. The red rectangles suggest ritual and elemental associations (blood and fire, life and death), while an inner light seems to emanate from the white center, suggesting an ethereal, numinous glow. For Rothko, color was the key to a spiritual realm, evoking transcendental truths that could not be expressed through recognizable imagery.

Excerpted from Los Angeles County Museum of Art (World of Art series). Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; London: Thames & Hudson, 2003.

The three richly colored rectangles blending together in White Center explore color as a tool for evoking transcendental truths, or what Mark Rothko referred to as the sublime. Together with Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, Rothko used swaths of color to produce a meditative response in the viewer, not unlike a religious or mythic experience. For these artists, color was capable of communicating essential aspects of the human experience, whereas recognizable imagery was not. When pressed to explain the apparent absence of subject matter in his work, Rothko argued that his canvases took on the “tragic and timeless” as subject, the most basic and universal of human emotions.

Wall label, 2021. .

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