Uploaded December 2023 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago

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Joy, despair, ecstasy, tragedy: these are some of the themes that Mark Rothko sought to express in his luminous art. Rothko is renowned for his towering abstract paintings on canvas, but few people know that he also created nearly 1,000 paintings on paper over the course of his career. He viewed many of these as finished paintings in their own right—not simply preliminary studies intended for his own eyes. These remarkable works challenge our expectations about what “counts” as painting, as well as popular ideas about Rothko and his career.

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