Rothko was a major innovator of color-field painting, a segment of the 1940s-50s Abstract Expressionist movement. Light Over Gray exemplifies his mature style. Two indistinct rectangles hover over a deep red background. The shapes are isolated from one another, and seem to represent many possible dualities; earth and sky, light and dark, or life and death. The uneven, pulsating colors, as in much of Rothko’s work, seem to project and recede, giving the impression of movement. The painting’s large size and nebulous spaces also add to its sense of spirituality and intimacy.

Rothko intended his works to represent universal ideas that would evoke a personal response in the viewer. “I’m not an abstract artist,” he claimed, “I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on…The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience as I had when I painted them.”

Rothko was born Marcus Rothkovitch in Dvinsk (present day Daugavpils) in the Latvian area of Russia in 1903. Ten years later his family emigrated to the United States and settled in Portland, Oregon. In 1921 he enrolled at Yale Univerity but became dissatified with academic studies and dropped out after two years. In 1925 he embarked on a career as a painter and studied for a brief time with Max Weber at the Art Students League in New York. From 1929 to 1952 he supported his work as a painter by teaching at the Center Academy in Brooklyn and during the 1930's was employed for a time by the W.P.A.

From the late 1940's to the late 1950's Rothko employed bright hues to a large extent, but during the last ten to twelve years of his life, the colors tend to become more somber, brooding, and mysterious, culminating in the black paintings just before he committed suicide in 1970.

Source: Bulletin, July-August 1975.