Picture of Rothko from the Pace Gallery website

“There’s no question of getting the full effect of the Rothko experience from a reproduction. You have to allow your eye and mind to be engulfed by their saturated fields of colour, to give yourself over to the painter’s vision. This is particularly true of paintings as large and as encompassing as Rothko’s - but it is also true of all great art…Just as you can lose yourself in a good book or a great piece of music, so the process of looking at art can be all-absorbing. You may come to a painting or a piece of sculpture wondering how you can bear to look at it for more than a few seconds, but if you really enter into it, you won’t be able to drag yourself away.  With that sense of absorption, comes a search for spiritual significance…His kind of seriousness has not for some time been fashionable, but the art that emerged from it clearly speaks to audiences in a way that goes beyond the ephemeral nature of contemporary culture.  As the dust settles on the artistic upheavals of the last century, Rothko emerges as a towering figure, a tragic genius in the tradition of Beethoven, Goya or Van Gogh…He is, arguably, the last great painter.”

- “Rothko Exhibition: Art Replaces Religious Faith” by Mark Hudson Published by The Telegraph in 2008

Full article here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3561167/Rothko-exhibition-art-replaces-religious-faith.html