No. 21

In the pivotal year of 1949, Rothko distanced himself from his Surrealist-inspired work of the 1940s and began to explore pure abstraction by painting soft-focus squares in diaphanous colors. 1949 is also the year that Matisse's 1911 painting The Red Studio, in which the artist's room is subsumed by a brilliant field of solid Venetian red, went on view at the Museum of Modern Art. The combination in No. 21 of a deep red with slate blue underpainting is close to Matisse's painting. As if to emphasize the process that occurs in his own work, Rothko said of The Red Studio-purportedly his favorite modern picture-"When you looked at that painting, you became that color, you became totally saturated with it."

Credit: Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation Inc., 1985