This is another book from my list of books to read after Finals. I became interested in Rothko after seeing the Seagram Murals at Tate Modern. It's the closest I've had to a spiritual experience while looking at art. He was also mentioned in a novel I read at the time (around 2002), Twelve by Nick McDonell, that also fetishized Nietzsche and North Face jackets, and was set in New York (thanks to Fran for helping me find it!). This is a collection of essays by academics about Rothko's life and work, his own statements about art (which he stopped making public by the early 1950s), and his materials. It also includes about 100 reproductions of his paintings, including early works that I wasn't familiar with. I had no idea that he went through classical mythical symbolist and surrealist phases before he found his recognizable abstract rectangular forms. I was expecting to understand more about what led him to take his own life in 1970 (apart from depression), but I'm not much wiser about that. I was aware that some of his paintings got increasingly dark towards the end of his life. I also didn't know that his later paintings were executed with the help of assistants. Presumably by this stage he was able to afford it, but I also think it was a result of some health problems. I was fascinated that some of his works, including the Harvard Murals, have deteriorated and changed how they look due to the synthetic materials he was using. He ran out of paint during the project and bought some cheap paint from Woolworth's! Some of his last paintings were also made on paper.
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