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"The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!"

Abstract painting is often compared to music. If that's so, then Mark Rothko's paintings are the big ballads of art.

Mark Rothko was a painter, often classified as an abstract expressionist (although Rothko denied being an abstract painter).
After his early interest in Surrealism, Rothko completely turned towards abstraction. In his multiforms, multiply-layered, freely composed, varying shapes of colour, he devoted all attention to the interaction of colour and shape in both the contrasts and harmonies resulting from their combination. In the later phase for which he is best known, Rothko most often arranged three horizontal, coloured rectangles with slightly blurring edges above one another. Like no artist before him did he foreground the expressive potential of colour alone. His work concentrated on basic emotions, often filling the canvas with very few intense colours, with little immediately-apparent detail. In this respect, he can also be considered to presage the color field painters. Although respected by other artists, Rothko remained in relative obscurity, supporting himself by teaching art.

By the late '50s Rothko was a very successful painter, and he hated it. At least, he distrusted the grounds of his success.He refused to talk about technique, angrily denied that he was a colorist, and challenged his viewers to find the tragedy lurking in the canvases (Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy was his favorite book). "I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface," he claimed.

Rothko’s oversized, unframed, color-saturated canvases were meant to engage the viewer through envelopment. These large-scale pictures are all encompassing, and their gaseous forms of vibrant color were intentionally placed to pulsate optically and sustain the viewer’s attention through physical sensations and constantly changing visual perceptions.

As he tries to instill more and more tragedy into his work, it turns automatically to gold. Rothko's journey into literal and figurative darkness left behind a shimmering trail of canvases that mark for many people the high-water mark of spiritual beauty and emotion in modern art. He suffered the strange fate of many artists who aim for the sublime, then find their work enlisted in other all-too-human narratives.

After a long struggle with depression and descent into alcohol, paranoia, Rothko committed suicide by cutting his wrists in his New York studio on February 25, 1970.
So if you are seeking a musical equivalent for Rothko, surely it ought to be something contemporary classical, like Morton Feldman.

Morton Feldman: "Rothko Chapel"


Inside the Rothko Chapel:

A documentary about Mark Rothko: Simon Schama's Power of Art - Rothko, part 1 of 7