By AFPRelaxnews | Oct 18, 2023
The show at the Louis Vuitton Foundation spans Rothko's entire career, from the more traditional figurative pictures to the huge rectangles of brooding colour for which he is best remembered
[CAPTION]Mark Rothko's "Inner glow" at blockbuster Paris show Mark Rothko's "Inner glow" at blockbuster Paris show
Image: Agnes Coudurier / AFPTV / AFP©[/CAPTION]
A huge show of 115 works by Mark Rothko opens in Paris this week. His son says he combined a "European soul" with "the freedom of America" to become an icon of 20th-century art.
The show at the Louis Vuitton Foundation spans Rothko's entire career, from the more traditional figurative pictures to the huge rectangles of brooding colour for which he is best remembered.
Rothko's stated goal was to "raise painting to the same level as music and poetry", said his son Christopher Rothko, who helped curate the exhibition and has written a new collection of essays to coincide with it.
_RSS_"My father died when I was six but we talked about music a great deal," he told AFP ahead of the opening on Wednesday.
"He spoke of Mozart, smiling with tears in his eyes, and I think it's the same effect with his paintings," he added.
Marcus Rothkovitch was born to a Jewish family in 1903 in Daugavpils, then known as Dvinsk, in modern-day Latvia—his family emigrating 10 years later to the United States.
He discovered his vocation fairly late, in the 1930s, but his early works already capture a dark mood, full of isolated and melancholy figures.
Figurative art did not come naturally—"he became aware of not being able to paint without mutilating it," said co-curator Suzanne Page—and by the 1940s he was dabbling in surrealism.
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