Ochre and Red on Red

Two glowing bands of warm color fill this canvas by Mark Rothko. A soft ochre yellow hovers at the top, an intense orange sits below it, and both float against a deep red field. The edges never turn sharp. Instead they feather and dissolve, which makes the rectangles seem to pulse and drift, as if they were lit from somewhere behind the surface. Rothko finished "Ochre and Red on Red" in 1954, well into the period when this stacked color style had become his signature.

Rothko worked in New York among the Abstract Expressionists, a wave of American painters active around the middle of the twentieth century. His huge canvases were meant to hit people in the gut, and he liked visitors to stand close, almost surrounded by the color. Oddly enough, he bristled at being called a colorist and swore he cared nothing for color as decoration. To him these warm rectangles carried heavy human emotions, from joy to grief to something close to tragedy. Even if none of that reaches you, the sunset-toned warmth of the painting is easy to sink into.