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Lot Essay
With its grand, all-encompassing scale and serene, meditative tones, Mark Rothko’s No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) stands as one of Abstract Expressionism’s greatest accomplishments. Painted at a critical juncture in the artist’s career, following his Seagram Murals and Harvard commission and just before he devoted the remainder of his career to the Rothko Chapel in Houston, No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) demonstrates the artist’s embrace of darker, more saturated colors; here, two different green rectangular forms—a central warm emerald color which dissolves into a cooler jade in the peripheries—operate in tandem to grant the work a mesmeric inner glow, providing a superb exemplar of what the critic Robert Rosenblum defines as Rothko’s “abstraction of the Sublime” (“The Abstract Sublime,” ARTnews, 59, no. 10., February 1961, p. 41). These greens are divided by a brilliant horizontal shot of red against an ethereal ground of royal violet and ultramarine blue. Rothko’s use of his most important color—red—and his favored color combination of green and violet articulates his artistic enterprise at its most intense and contemplative, adducing a contracted, meditative, and somber aura into the work which expresses itself to the viewer in terms of slow, ritualistic rhythms of pauses and lulls. Discussing Rothko’s large scale, darker works from the early 1960s, the artist’s son Christopher Rothko acclaims that “they are also some of his greatest works, their subtle shading and deeply saturated colors coming to the fore for the patient viewer who allows them to unfold their entire visual splendor” (C. Rothko, “The Experience Behind the Icon,” in K. Rothko Prizel and C. Rothko, Mark Rothko, New York, 2022, p. 27).
"When I was pregnant, I fell asleep, and when I got up, the whole Rothko had changed, and I wrote Rothko, and I said how much I loved the picture, and Rothko called up and said ‘I really like hearing that about my art.’" - Agnes Gund
No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) was one of the first masterpieces to enter Agnes Gund’s celebrated collection. She made her first major acquisition in 1966, obtaining Henry Moore’s Three-Way Piece No. 2: Archer from Sidney Janis Gallery, then donating the work to the Cleveland Museum of Art just four years later. In 1967, Agnes joined the Museum of Modern Art’s International Council, befriending many of the most significant collectors and patrons of the twentieth century. Agnes’ relationship with Emily Tremaine was especially close. Emily, with her husband Burton, assembled perhaps the greatest collection of modern and postwar art, bringing together masterpieces by modern luminaries including Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, and Piet Mondrian as well as contemporary works by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol. The Tremaines were some of Rothko’s earliest supporters, acquiring his early Number 8, 1952, from Betty Parsons Gallery in 1953. Agnes spotted the work while visiting the Tremaines and immediately fell in love with the artist. “Let’s go to Rothko’s studio,” Emily immediately suggested, and Agnes soon found herself personally introduced to the legendary artist in his studio (quoted in “Tremaine Timeline,” The Tremaine Collection, online, [accessed 3/6/25]). While Agnes initially desired an earlier work with a similarly bright palette to the Tremaine Rothko, the artist instead recommended the present work. Acquiring No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) directly from Rothko just three years after he painted the work, Agnes rapidly fell in love, only allowing the painting to leave her apartment on one occasion, for an exhibition at her beloved Cleveland Museum of Art. “I love to live with things, because I can see the works in different lights, at different times of day,” Agnes described of No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe). “When I was pregnant, I fell asleep, and when I got up, the whole Rothko had changed, and I wrote Rothko, and I said how much I loved the picture, and Rothko called up, and said ‘I really like hearing that about my art’” (quoted in “Tour Agnes ‘Aggie’ Gund’s Art-Filled New York City Apartment,” Aubin Pictures, Vimeo, March 22, 2021, online).
No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) is a masterful example of Rothko’s mature sectional abstractions, made just before Rothko’s transition into a more architectural style for the Rothko Chapel. In the later 1950s, the bright expanses of color of Rothko’s earlier work were gradually giving way to a more introspective palette of dark hues incorporating maroons, dark greens, blues, and violet. The present work pronounces the completion of the artist’s chromatic metamorphosis, lavishly expressing the deepened emotion which Rothko wrought from his darkened palette in pursuit of the Sublime. The three color forms expand almost the entire width of the canvas, balanced against the cool, deep ground. While the green areas dissolve into the dark ground, the narrow red band provides an electric shot through the composition, enlivening the canvas with a chromatic intensity not found in his Black Form series of dark blocks made later in 1964. Rothko’s ground here demonstrates his magisterial commitment to color—the turning edges of the canvas are painted in a pure ultramarine, recalling the deep blues of Giotto or Fra Angelico and adducing a deepened sense of spatial depth as the surface of the canvas appears to levitate out from the wall. This ultramarine intermixes with a royal violet at the margins of the picture plane in a complex interplay of pigments, with hints of rose madder, ochre, cadmium orange, and dark yellow also observable. The use of two of the most historically significant, revered, and valuable colors in the Western canon—ultramarine was reserved for depictions of the Virgin Mary, whilst violet was used solely for prelates of the Catholic Church and for the imperial family in Roman and later Byzantine art—underscores the reverence which Rothko held for the pigments he utilized. The present work articulates Rothko’s desire for color to elicit deep emotions inside his viewers and is among his most hermetic and awe-inspiring works.
"Rothko, like Friedrich and Turner, places us on the threshold of those shapeless infinities discussed by the estheticians of the Sublime... the floating, horizontal tiers of veiled light seem to conceal a total, remote presence that we can only intuit and never fully grasp." - Robert Rosenblum
No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) witnesses Rothko achieving the full potential of his materials and surface. Rather than leaving his canvas ground as a neutral space, the artist exploits the visual potential of this priming layer of pigment, emulating the technique of the old masters Titian and Velázquez. The ultramarine-violet expanse participates within the broader composition, unifying the surface of the painting by holding the three bands of color together. The noted Rothko expert and former Chief Conservator of the Menil Collection Carol Caruso Mancusi-Ungaro elaborates how in Rothko’s muted pre-chapel paintings of 1964, the artist achieves “a masterful engagement of color in which somber tones are painted on top of dark tones to create an ethereal effect” which exhibits the artist at the height of his technical talent (C. Mancusi-Ungaro, “Material and Immaterial Surface: The Paintings of Rothko,” in Mark Rothko, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1998, p. 292).
The ethereal experience which Rothko garners through the sophisticated versatility of his multilayered pigments embodies the artist’s pursuit of a transcendental, almost religious experience which achieved the Sublime, “The strongest of all passions” according to the philosopher Edmund Burke (On the Sublime and Beautiful, London, 1757, p. 32). This sublimity, for Robert Rosenblum, had only previously been approached by the Northern Romantic tradition. “Rothko, like Friedrich and Turner, places us on the threshold of those shapeless infinities discussed by the estheticians of the Sublime... the floating, horizontal tiers of veiled light” seen in paintings like No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) “seem to conceal a total, remote presence that we can only intuit and never fully grasp” (R. Rosenblum, op. cit., pp. 41, 56). The artist’s sophisticated cultural immersion, closely reading Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and most notably Nietzsche, whose Birth of Tragedy proved deeply affective, is apparent in Rothko’s definition of his painterly practice: “the way in which I could achieve the greatest intensity of the tragic irreconcilability of the basic violence which lies at the bottom of human existence and the daily life which must deal with it” (quoted in B. Novak and Brian O’Doherty, “Rothko’s Dark Painting: Tragedy and Void,” in Mark Rothko, op. cit., p. 267). The celebrated curator Nancy Spector identifies the milieu in which the present work was made as when Rothko most closely achieved his Nietzschean ideal, expressing in paint a union of the Apollonian and Dionysian: “Other, darker paintings from the early 1960s impact through intense chromatic contrast, and could be interpreted as more readily substantiating Rothko’s often cryptic commentary on the archetypical tensions in the paintings... In these canvases, deep brown to inky black quadrilaterals yield to high-keyed flashes of brilliant orange and red forms. The ‘drama’ that Rothko describes as inherent to his art in the 1947 statement intensifies with the muting of his overall palette and the simultaneous sharpening of its complementary color distinctions. However, the paintings—conceived as allegorical theaters of human emotion or states of being—can never be reduced to specific affects, despite the feelings they may elicit in a viewer” (N. Spector, “Mark Rothko’s Classic Paintings: Theaters of the Mind,” in Mark Rothko, exh. cat., Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2023, p. 234).
Rothko conceived of his paintings as performed dramas enacting timeless tragedy. Like the ancient Greek and Roman playwrights and poets, Rothko sought through paint to engage his viewer with great emotional force, through which he could inspire a state of contemplative meditation. Just as a thespian stages all elements of a play, Rothko too was highly attuned to the installation and lighting of his works. In 1961, three years prior to No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe), Rothko had personally overseen the hang of his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, the first major one-person show devoted to a New York School artist. His close supervision of the exhibition’s installation, where he insisted on placing each painting in close proximity under diffuse lighting, allowed him to contemplate his completed oeuvre, heralding his shift in styles towards the more reserved, opaque tones seen in the present work, where he attained what Nietzsche describes as “the supreme goal of tragedy and of art in general” (The Birth of Tragedy, New York, 1993 [1872], p. 104).
The grand scale of the present work—the largest from this essential period still in private hands—is likewise an articulation of Rothko’s intent to control the atmosphere and environment in which his works were viewed and perceived. His daughter, Kate Rothko Prizel, notes how the increase in scale in the early to mid-1960s evolved from how “[her] father was interested in surrounding the viewer with his artwork and creating the opportunity for the viewer to sit and truly experience it” (K. Rothko Prizel, “Mark Rothko: A Daughter’s Sketch,” in K. Rothko Prizel and C. Rothko, Mark Rothko, op. cit., p. 46). No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe), at almost eight feet tall the second-highest format in Rothko’s oeuvre, establishes a painterly expanse symbolically bridging imaginary and real space. This space allows the viewer to grasp the nuanced tragic narratives Rothko veils behind his serene surface, enveloping them in a profound sense of embodiment. At once monumental and intimate, the present work offers a revelatory experience, defeating the space in which it is placed in order to become an all-consuming experience.
No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) emerges as the very fulcrum of Rothko’s legendary career. In 1961, the artist had his first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which then toured across Europe, landing in London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Basel, Rome, and Paris. The next year, he was commissioned by Harvard University for a series of murals, which were completed in 1963 and exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum before their final installation. At the end of 1963, Rothko’s second child, Christopher, was born. Notwithstanding Rothko’s personal and professional triumphs, the artist admitted to friends feeling trapped and stuck at an artistic impasse by the end of 1963. No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) signals the triumphant overcoming of this stalemate, revealing the formal directions which the artist would continue to explore throughout the remainder of his career by precipitating the style of his later dark paintings. His deemphasis of bright, vibrant color and concentration on surface and immaterial affects in the present work would continue into his famed murals for the Rothko Chapel, commissioned in April 1964 by the Houston collectors John and Dominique de Menil and fully realized posthumously in 1971. Absorbing the manifold lessons gleaned through his work on the Seagram and Harvard commissions, Rothko unleashes new perceptual strategies in No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) which, drawing on conceptions of religious contemplation, draw his spectator into what Barbara Novak and Brian O’Doherty describe as the “penumbra of a powerful idea.” (B. Novak and B. O’Doherty , op. cit., p. 273). The two art historians continue, poignantly describing Rothko’s profound achievement in his works produced in 1964: “[T]here is nothing else like them, nothing that issues so resolutely from an obsession with the grand irony of existence. And of course they are, as Rothko’s work often is, very close to nothing. Poised near this void, which is their content and their abstract substance, forced to be assertive through negative cancellations, they are profound and vulnerable” (ibid., p. 281).
Of seminal artistic importance to Rothko’s career, the present work is similarly exceptional in its provenance, being one of three pure color field paintings acquired directly from the artist which still remains with their original owner. Having appeared only once in public since its acquisition in 1967, No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) is an exceptionally rare example of the artist’s celebrated sectional abstractions before his transition into an almost entirely dark palette in the second half of 1964. Rothko would paint no more independent canvases the following year, devoting himself entirely to the Rothko Chapel. Incorporating his earlier style within the grand scale and contemplative, enrapturing palette of his darker works, the present work represents the zenith of Rothko’s painterly career, encapsulating both his earlier achievements from the 1960s and anticipating his ritualistic, deeply emotive production inspired by Nietzsche which would follow the remainder of the decade. The work articulates what Spector celebrates as “the ethereal beauty of his canvases, a union in his mind of the Apollonian and Dionysian,” which “gave cover for Rothko to ‘achieve the greatest intensity of the tragic, [the] irreconcilability of the basic violence which lies at the bottom of human existence and the daily life which must derail with it’” (N. Spector, op. cit., p. 235).
"When I was pregnant, I fell asleep, and when I got up, the whole Rothko had changed, and I wrote Rothko, and I said how much I loved the picture, and Rothko called up and said ‘I really like hearing that about my art.’" - Agnes Gund
No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) was one of the first masterpieces to enter Agnes Gund’s celebrated collection. She made her first major acquisition in 1966, obtaining Henry Moore’s Three-Way Piece No. 2: Archer from Sidney Janis Gallery, then donating the work to the Cleveland Museum of Art just four years later. In 1967, Agnes joined the Museum of Modern Art’s International Council, befriending many of the most significant collectors and patrons of the twentieth century. Agnes’ relationship with Emily Tremaine was especially close. Emily, with her husband Burton, assembled perhaps the greatest collection of modern and postwar art, bringing together masterpieces by modern luminaries including Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, and Piet Mondrian as well as contemporary works by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol. The Tremaines were some of Rothko’s earliest supporters, acquiring his early Number 8, 1952, from Betty Parsons Gallery in 1953. Agnes spotted the work while visiting the Tremaines and immediately fell in love with the artist. “Let’s go to Rothko’s studio,” Emily immediately suggested, and Agnes soon found herself personally introduced to the legendary artist in his studio (quoted in “Tremaine Timeline,” The Tremaine Collection, online, [accessed 3/6/25]). While Agnes initially desired an earlier work with a similarly bright palette to the Tremaine Rothko, the artist instead recommended the present work. Acquiring No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) directly from Rothko just three years after he painted the work, Agnes rapidly fell in love, only allowing the painting to leave her apartment on one occasion, for an exhibition at her beloved Cleveland Museum of Art. “I love to live with things, because I can see the works in different lights, at different times of day,” Agnes described of No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe). “When I was pregnant, I fell asleep, and when I got up, the whole Rothko had changed, and I wrote Rothko, and I said how much I loved the picture, and Rothko called up, and said ‘I really like hearing that about my art’” (quoted in “Tour Agnes ‘Aggie’ Gund’s Art-Filled New York City Apartment,” Aubin Pictures, Vimeo, March 22, 2021, online).
No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) is a masterful example of Rothko’s mature sectional abstractions, made just before Rothko’s transition into a more architectural style for the Rothko Chapel. In the later 1950s, the bright expanses of color of Rothko’s earlier work were gradually giving way to a more introspective palette of dark hues incorporating maroons, dark greens, blues, and violet. The present work pronounces the completion of the artist’s chromatic metamorphosis, lavishly expressing the deepened emotion which Rothko wrought from his darkened palette in pursuit of the Sublime. The three color forms expand almost the entire width of the canvas, balanced against the cool, deep ground. While the green areas dissolve into the dark ground, the narrow red band provides an electric shot through the composition, enlivening the canvas with a chromatic intensity not found in his Black Form series of dark blocks made later in 1964. Rothko’s ground here demonstrates his magisterial commitment to color—the turning edges of the canvas are painted in a pure ultramarine, recalling the deep blues of Giotto or Fra Angelico and adducing a deepened sense of spatial depth as the surface of the canvas appears to levitate out from the wall. This ultramarine intermixes with a royal violet at the margins of the picture plane in a complex interplay of pigments, with hints of rose madder, ochre, cadmium orange, and dark yellow also observable. The use of two of the most historically significant, revered, and valuable colors in the Western canon—ultramarine was reserved for depictions of the Virgin Mary, whilst violet was used solely for prelates of the Catholic Church and for the imperial family in Roman and later Byzantine art—underscores the reverence which Rothko held for the pigments he utilized. The present work articulates Rothko’s desire for color to elicit deep emotions inside his viewers and is among his most hermetic and awe-inspiring works.
"Rothko, like Friedrich and Turner, places us on the threshold of those shapeless infinities discussed by the estheticians of the Sublime... the floating, horizontal tiers of veiled light seem to conceal a total, remote presence that we can only intuit and never fully grasp." - Robert Rosenblum
No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) witnesses Rothko achieving the full potential of his materials and surface. Rather than leaving his canvas ground as a neutral space, the artist exploits the visual potential of this priming layer of pigment, emulating the technique of the old masters Titian and Velázquez. The ultramarine-violet expanse participates within the broader composition, unifying the surface of the painting by holding the three bands of color together. The noted Rothko expert and former Chief Conservator of the Menil Collection Carol Caruso Mancusi-Ungaro elaborates how in Rothko’s muted pre-chapel paintings of 1964, the artist achieves “a masterful engagement of color in which somber tones are painted on top of dark tones to create an ethereal effect” which exhibits the artist at the height of his technical talent (C. Mancusi-Ungaro, “Material and Immaterial Surface: The Paintings of Rothko,” in Mark Rothko, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1998, p. 292).
The ethereal experience which Rothko garners through the sophisticated versatility of his multilayered pigments embodies the artist’s pursuit of a transcendental, almost religious experience which achieved the Sublime, “The strongest of all passions” according to the philosopher Edmund Burke (On the Sublime and Beautiful, London, 1757, p. 32). This sublimity, for Robert Rosenblum, had only previously been approached by the Northern Romantic tradition. “Rothko, like Friedrich and Turner, places us on the threshold of those shapeless infinities discussed by the estheticians of the Sublime... the floating, horizontal tiers of veiled light” seen in paintings like No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) “seem to conceal a total, remote presence that we can only intuit and never fully grasp” (R. Rosenblum, op. cit., pp. 41, 56). The artist’s sophisticated cultural immersion, closely reading Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and most notably Nietzsche, whose Birth of Tragedy proved deeply affective, is apparent in Rothko’s definition of his painterly practice: “the way in which I could achieve the greatest intensity of the tragic irreconcilability of the basic violence which lies at the bottom of human existence and the daily life which must deal with it” (quoted in B. Novak and Brian O’Doherty, “Rothko’s Dark Painting: Tragedy and Void,” in Mark Rothko, op. cit., p. 267). The celebrated curator Nancy Spector identifies the milieu in which the present work was made as when Rothko most closely achieved his Nietzschean ideal, expressing in paint a union of the Apollonian and Dionysian: “Other, darker paintings from the early 1960s impact through intense chromatic contrast, and could be interpreted as more readily substantiating Rothko’s often cryptic commentary on the archetypical tensions in the paintings... In these canvases, deep brown to inky black quadrilaterals yield to high-keyed flashes of brilliant orange and red forms. The ‘drama’ that Rothko describes as inherent to his art in the 1947 statement intensifies with the muting of his overall palette and the simultaneous sharpening of its complementary color distinctions. However, the paintings—conceived as allegorical theaters of human emotion or states of being—can never be reduced to specific affects, despite the feelings they may elicit in a viewer” (N. Spector, “Mark Rothko’s Classic Paintings: Theaters of the Mind,” in Mark Rothko, exh. cat., Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2023, p. 234).
Rothko conceived of his paintings as performed dramas enacting timeless tragedy. Like the ancient Greek and Roman playwrights and poets, Rothko sought through paint to engage his viewer with great emotional force, through which he could inspire a state of contemplative meditation. Just as a thespian stages all elements of a play, Rothko too was highly attuned to the installation and lighting of his works. In 1961, three years prior to No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe), Rothko had personally overseen the hang of his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, the first major one-person show devoted to a New York School artist. His close supervision of the exhibition’s installation, where he insisted on placing each painting in close proximity under diffuse lighting, allowed him to contemplate his completed oeuvre, heralding his shift in styles towards the more reserved, opaque tones seen in the present work, where he attained what Nietzsche describes as “the supreme goal of tragedy and of art in general” (The Birth of Tragedy, New York, 1993 [1872], p. 104).
The grand scale of the present work—the largest from this essential period still in private hands—is likewise an articulation of Rothko’s intent to control the atmosphere and environment in which his works were viewed and perceived. His daughter, Kate Rothko Prizel, notes how the increase in scale in the early to mid-1960s evolved from how “[her] father was interested in surrounding the viewer with his artwork and creating the opportunity for the viewer to sit and truly experience it” (K. Rothko Prizel, “Mark Rothko: A Daughter’s Sketch,” in K. Rothko Prizel and C. Rothko, Mark Rothko, op. cit., p. 46). No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe), at almost eight feet tall the second-highest format in Rothko’s oeuvre, establishes a painterly expanse symbolically bridging imaginary and real space. This space allows the viewer to grasp the nuanced tragic narratives Rothko veils behind his serene surface, enveloping them in a profound sense of embodiment. At once monumental and intimate, the present work offers a revelatory experience, defeating the space in which it is placed in order to become an all-consuming experience.
No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) emerges as the very fulcrum of Rothko’s legendary career. In 1961, the artist had his first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which then toured across Europe, landing in London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Basel, Rome, and Paris. The next year, he was commissioned by Harvard University for a series of murals, which were completed in 1963 and exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum before their final installation. At the end of 1963, Rothko’s second child, Christopher, was born. Notwithstanding Rothko’s personal and professional triumphs, the artist admitted to friends feeling trapped and stuck at an artistic impasse by the end of 1963. No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) signals the triumphant overcoming of this stalemate, revealing the formal directions which the artist would continue to explore throughout the remainder of his career by precipitating the style of his later dark paintings. His deemphasis of bright, vibrant color and concentration on surface and immaterial affects in the present work would continue into his famed murals for the Rothko Chapel, commissioned in April 1964 by the Houston collectors John and Dominique de Menil and fully realized posthumously in 1971. Absorbing the manifold lessons gleaned through his work on the Seagram and Harvard commissions, Rothko unleashes new perceptual strategies in No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) which, drawing on conceptions of religious contemplation, draw his spectator into what Barbara Novak and Brian O’Doherty describe as the “penumbra of a powerful idea.” (B. Novak and B. O’Doherty , op. cit., p. 273). The two art historians continue, poignantly describing Rothko’s profound achievement in his works produced in 1964: “[T]here is nothing else like them, nothing that issues so resolutely from an obsession with the grand irony of existence. And of course they are, as Rothko’s work often is, very close to nothing. Poised near this void, which is their content and their abstract substance, forced to be assertive through negative cancellations, they are profound and vulnerable” (ibid., p. 281).
Of seminal artistic importance to Rothko’s career, the present work is similarly exceptional in its provenance, being one of three pure color field paintings acquired directly from the artist which still remains with their original owner. Having appeared only once in public since its acquisition in 1967, No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) is an exceptionally rare example of the artist’s celebrated sectional abstractions before his transition into an almost entirely dark palette in the second half of 1964. Rothko would paint no more independent canvases the following year, devoting himself entirely to the Rothko Chapel. Incorporating his earlier style within the grand scale and contemplative, enrapturing palette of his darker works, the present work represents the zenith of Rothko’s painterly career, encapsulating both his earlier achievements from the 1960s and anticipating his ritualistic, deeply emotive production inspired by Nietzsche which would follow the remainder of the decade. The work articulates what Spector celebrates as “the ethereal beauty of his canvases, a union in his mind of the Apollonian and Dionysian,” which “gave cover for Rothko to ‘achieve the greatest intensity of the tragic, [the] irreconcilability of the basic violence which lies at the bottom of human existence and the daily life which must derail with it’” (N. Spector, op. cit., p. 235).