It is a journey into the work and soul of Mark Rothko, the extraordinary retrospective, the largest ever held in France, which can be visited until 2 April at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris.
It is seeing in 115 works all the nuances of his personality, the search for form and color, but above all the search for an inner balance never found, until the tragic epilogue.
They are works that tell of the artist's first period, when images had not yet completely given way to colour, but the influences of research and the artists of his time emerged from the brush.
And so consciously and unconsciously, from the - already beautiful - paintings of European youth, we glimpse the forms and spirit of surrealism and Salvador Dalì, of cubism and Picasso, of Matisse and some transcendental gloom of Chagall.
The first retrospective in France dedicated to Mark Rothko (1903-1970) was that of the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris in 1999, but this is definitely the most exhaustive with works from the largest international institutional and private collections, in particular the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Tate in London, the Phillips Collection as well as the artist's family.
It completely crosses all the spaces of the Foundation, a building of glass and water immersed in the forest with sails unfurled like a boat, from a project by the American architect Frank Gehry, following a chronological path, it retraces the entire life of the artist from the first figurative paintings.
We therefore start from the oil paintings of the early Thirties, when the young Rothko, born Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz, had already left Russia together with his entire family of Jewish origins to move to New York, where he voluntarily died on the 25th February 1970.
Intimate scenes and dark-coloured urban suburbs, such as the subway scenes, which make us think of our Mario Sironi.
Reality soon gives way to a dramatic expressionism, which reflects the war condition.
But it is from 1946 that Rothko turns decisively and definitively towards abstraction, with a first phase known as Multiforme, which then translates into his typical essentiality of the 'classics' of the 1950s where rectangular shapes overlap following a binary or ternary rhythm .
First in the sign of color from which the universe of nature and emotions shines out simultaneously in a single sign, then gradually darker until the abyss of black which swallows up everything else.
In 1958 Rothko was commissioned to create a series of murals for the Four Seasons restaurant designed by Philip Johnson for the Seagram Building - including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe leads the construction in New York.
Rothko ultimately gives up on delivering the order and keeps the entire series.
Eleven years later, in 1969, the artist donated nine of his paintings to the Tate.
These paintings, which are distinguished from the previous ones by their deep red hues, constitute a room dedicated exclusively to his work within the collections, and the set is presented exceptionally in the exhibition.
Furthermore, the exhibition is also enriched by the philological presentation of the first "Rothko Room" which in 1960 the Phillips Collection dedicated a permanent room to the painter.
Absolutely unique and unmissable.
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