Simon Schama's Power of Art - Episode 08: Rothko - Black on Maroon

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Mark Rothko, the Anglicized name of a Russian Jewish family which immigrated while he was a child to escape the abusive Cossacks, shortly before father's dead, initially followed the European painting tradition, but felt it failed to express the most meaningful emotions. After decades he developed an abstract style and got the reputation of the US's foremost painter by the 1950s, enough to be commissioned without contest a gigantic work for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram company's New York skyscraper, worth millions, which he ultimately turned down delivering, preferring patrons further from capitalism, which he distanced himself from. Simon highly esteems his work, often sets of abstract paintings each framing an empty space, supposedly the morbid window to a deep meaning. Ruthko's brooding finally lead him to suicide, after a life of chain-smoking already wrecking his health.

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