Dark Palette

Rothko: Dark Palette is the catalogue for an exhibition held at Pace Gallery, New York, from November 4, 2016 to January 7, 2017, focused on the somber, dark-toned paintings Mark Rothko made in the last years of his life.

The 60-page hardcover volume, published by PaceWildenstein/Pace Gallery with text by the dealer and Pace founder Arne Glimcher, reproduces the deep maroons, blacks and browns Rothko turned to after the vivid color-field canvases of the 1950s, work often read against the mood of the Rothko Chapel commission and his final years before his death in 1970.

Rothko (1903-1970), born Marcus Rothkowitz in Daugavpils, Latvia, emigrated to the United States as a child and became a central figure of American Abstract Expressionism. From 1949 he developed the large-scale color-field paintings of stacked, softly bordered rectangles for which he is best known. His later work grew progressively darker in palette as his health and outlook declined in the years before his suicide in 1970.