A modern painting’s greatness is often seen by its capability to provoke deep emotions in the viewer. Standing before Mark Rothko’s vast fields of color for the first time, I was struck by how such simple forms could hold such emotional intensity. It brought me back to Henri Matisse’s deep colors that made me fall in love with Modernism years before. Both Matisse, the French father of Fauvism, and decades later Rothko, a major figure of American Abstract Expressionism, valued color to the same extent: a way to irradiate the viewer with emotion. Technique has never been the goal, but rather the ability to share emotions with us.
Henri Matisse is one of the founding figures of Modernism, the art movement running from the 1860s-70s to the 1960s, that revolutionized art history. His approach to color led him to the creation of Fauvism, alongside André Derain, a movement seeking to capture the emotion of their subjects using vivid colors and textured brushwork. Although Matisse mastered technique, his ambition was expression. To achieve direct expression, his intuition led him to simplification. Even further: a work of art should convey its meaning even before the viewer recognizes its subject. In his Notes of a painter (1908), he writes “There are two ways of expressing things: one is to show them crudely, the other is to evoke them through art. By removing oneself from the literal representation of movement one attains greater beauty and grandeur”.
His work, La Danse (1909) showcases this liberation of bodies and colors. The painting depicts five naked women holding hands and dancing in an almost perfect circle. Almost, as two hands quite touch but do not meet, creating within the circle a restless forward surge. The painting is mesmerizing as the open circle invites the viewer to join the dance, that becomes a symbol of community and human connection, a timeless dance that represents an almost ritual event. One feels drawn to the painting as Matisse used intense colors – an ethereal pink against an infinite blue – in his invitation to show the world with pure instinct. Looking closer, you can see how Matisse works: you can follow the path of his brush across the canvas, his fast and powerful movement, leaving drops of paint and allowing the canvas to show through the thinly applied paint in places. It is raw, but it is not a lack of labor, rather a masterpiece of omission. The fascinating paradox is that Matisse could have worked for weeks on the preparation of an artwork, only to leave everything aside in the actual painting to preserve the vibration of the sketch. He does not want to show the construction of things but their pure radiance.
Far from seeking disorder as sometimes believed, Matisse sees in color a healing power. The artist aims at absolute clarity through color and wants to create a place of spiritual peace and equilibrium between the unrest of the modern world and the pure tranquility on the canvas. “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing matter – a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue”.
Matisse’s pursuit of serenity might seem an unlikely source of inspiration for Mark Rothko. Yet, his use of color profoundly shaped Rothko, who recalled spending hours studying The Red Studio (1911) at MoMA, during the pivotal year of 1949, when he began to explore pure abstraction. What fascinated Rothko was the profound Venetian red enveloping the canvas: “When you look at that painting, you become that color, you became totally saturated with it”. At the death of the French artist, Rothko painted Homage to Matisse (1954), echoing his words “from those months and that looking every day all of my painting was born”. More than color, one sees similarities in technique, especially within their backgrounds and how both artists apply color with energetic brushstrokes.
Rothko’s gigantic panels often stir strong emotions within viewers. The artist himself invites the viewer to embark on a meditative trance: “The spectator must move with the artist’s shapes in and out, under and above, diagonally and horizontally; he must curve around spheres, pass through tunnels, glide down inclines, at times perform an aerial feat of flying from point to point, attracted by some irresistible magnet across space”. It may seem abstract, but the reality is there: standing in front of the canvas past the borders, you feel enveloped by Rothko’s primal colors. Your eyes wander restlessly on the surface of the painting, losing yourself in the rectangles slowly dissolving into each other, their indistinct blending growing more intense the longer you look. Immersed in your thoughts looking at the painting, you start to feel what Rothko wanted to tell you, as if you were creating an intimacy with the painting.
Rothko found a lot of inspiration in the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, especially from The Birth of Tragedy (1872), where he develops his concept of the Apollonian and Dionysian forces in art. For Nietzsche, the Apollonian refers to form, measure, contours and the beautiful appearance that makes existence bearable. The Dionysian refers to intoxication, excess, passion, the dissolution of individual boundaries and an experience in which joy and suffering are inseparable. The first force is associated with dreams and sculpture, while the second one is associated with music. Although these forces oppose each other, Nietzsche sees them as complementary, with the fascinating idea that the Apollonian gives form and restraint to Dionysian energy, thus producing peak of art, or what he calls the “metaphysical consolation”: Greek tragedy. This union allowed spectators to be confronted with suffering while affirming life in all its intensity, as it is the Dionysian that takes people to different places and that is transformative for the listener or viewer.
The craziest part is that you will have the possibility, in your lifetime, to experience this metaphysical consolation. Abstraction allows painting to reach a level of intensity and power previously attributed to music. To achieve this musical intensity, Rothko gradually dissolved the human figure, allowing him to retain the power of myth without telling a story or depicting gods or heroes, evoking the tragic without the need for a tragic narrative. Rothko explained that the painter’s work must progress towards clarity: the disappearance of recognizable form is part of this pursuit, allowing color itself to carry emotions.
There you understand what differentiates Rothko from Matisse: both use color to express emotion, but Rothko’s colors irradiate with violence. You cannot look at a painting without knowing Rothko was delving into depression and expressing it through his murals: “I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene… that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface”. Rothko’s art grew darker over time, culminating with the creation of the Rothko Chapel (1971) in Houston, a non-denominational space whose experience is not unlike religious transcendence. Viewers feel overwhelmed: is it the crushing disposition of the fourteen black canvases, or is it the pain shared in every brushwork, when Rothko’s point has always been your empathy?
Perhaps what these paintings ask of us, above all, is to be receptive viewers: to be sensitive to the artist’s choices of colors and lines, and to let ourselves feel before trying to understand. For me, this is where the power of their art lies. Henri Matisse helped transform modern painting by establishing color as an independent source of power, paving the way for a freedom of emotional expression that continues to inspire artists today. Mark Rothko carried that freedom into abstraction, making color itself the bearer of human tragedy. Both changed the course of art history, yet their achievement remains deeply personal: decades later, someone can stand before their canvases and be moved to tears.
