Mark Rothko (1903-1970), Green, Blue, Green on Blue

signed and dated 'MARK ROTHKO 1968' (on the reverse). acrylic on paper laid down on canvas. 40½ x 26½in. (102.9 x 67.3cm.). Painted in 1968. Estimate £2,500,000 - £3,500,000

Provenance: Mrs. Daniel Goldreyer, New York.
Mr. and Mrs. Philip L. Wintergreen II Foundation, Indianapolis.
Anon sale, Christie's London, 2 December 1975, lot 123.
Bill Bass, Chicago.
Anon. sale, Christie's London, 20 June 1981, lot 230.
Anon. sale, Christie's London, 4 December 1996, lot 37.
Estate of Charles Evans, New York.

Exhibited: Bloomington, Indiana University Museum, The American Scene 1900-1970: An Exhibition of 20th Century Painting, April-May 1970, no. 22.

Notes: 'I never really thought of my father as an urban painter, but I guess I think back and I particularly remember a train trip across the country I took with my father, I guess, in 1967. And while I was still a teenager and probably not as open to discussing his painting as I now wish I had been I do remember his pointing out how influenced he had been by the colours and the vista in the South West, particularly New Mexico. I guess New Mexico has all of the clay coloured landscape and things against sort of subtle greens that I remember him commenting on most. I think one can think of the paintings in terms of landscape certainly in the influence on colour and I think much of that was taken from nature, but not in conception. My father was a very urban person and I think one of the reasons that people may try to connect his paintings with the urban setting is his great love for New York, he was always reluctant to leave and had to be dragged away to go anywhere for the summer. Even to go to Provincetown or to the end of Long Island it was almost like pulling teeth.' (Kate Rothko Prizel in interview' in Rothko's Rooms: The Life and Works of an American Artist, BBC Films, London, 2000)

In late 1967 after three years of intense and exhausting work Rothko finally completed the most important project of his life; the large and profoundly moving series of black murals for the Menil Chapel in Houston. As a direct contrast to these vast and largely monochromatic black oil paintings, Rothko deliberately began to paint on a smaller scale and with the new and more direct and immediate medium of acrylics.

A few months later, in the spring of 1968 the 65 year-old artist suffered a massive aneurysm to his aorta and after his recovery was advised by his doctors never to work with the more strenuous medium of oils or on paintings of over 40'' in height again. In response to these restrictive conditions, in the summer of that year Rothko began to fully explore the new acrylic medium in a series of paintings executed on paper which he later laid down on panel or canvas for the purpose of preservation. Untitled of 1968 is an impressive and commanding example from this dramatic and important late series of paintings.

Rothko's acrylic paintings were in many ways a re-exploration in a different medium of the profound depths of feeling Rothko had immersed himself in for the Houston Chapel murals. His central theme there had been the Passion of Christ, the finality of death and the reality of the human spirit. Working over the summer of 1968 after his own recent brush with death and with its constant threat still hanging over him, this heavy drinking, heavy smoking, hypochondriac painter who throughout his life had sought an art of transcendence, dedicated himself to his work like never before. Seeking both solace and meaning from his art, Rothko's late works seek to emulate the great tragedies of his literary heroes Aeschylus and Shakespeare. Sombre, heavy colours predominate in most, drawing out the chthonic dionysian forces of elemental nature and confining them within the picture plane in such a way that each work conjures a sense of monumental emotion compressed into a small and unremarkable human scale.

Working on several paintings at one time by taping each work against a large plywood backboard that served as an easel, the intensity of these acrylics often clearly reflects the tragic conditions of the artist's life at this time. As his biographer James Breslin has pointed out, since the spring of 1968 Rothko had experienced a series of losses. He had separated from his wife and children, left his home to live in his studio and his recent aneurysm had robbed him of his sexual potency, and prompted his doctors to insist he stick to strict diet and abstain from drinking and smoking. Rothko largely ignored the doctor's advice concerning alcohol and cigarettes and as his friend Stanley Kunitz recalled, began to move "out of the world in general. He became solely self-preoccupied. That was one of the after effects of the aneurysm, and I think he was rejecting family, Mell (his wife) and the children and everything except art." (cited in Mark Rothko ; A Biography James E. B. Breslin, Chicago 1993, p. 505.)

With its comparatively rare organic colouring, Untitled seems to convey an overwhelming sense of the vastness of sky and landscape compressed into the scale of human experience. The power, potency and depth of these elements are echoed through the gravitas of the swift but also light brushstrokes that Rothko has used to make the painting's radiant and shimmering surface. Seeming to express an inexplicable but also overwhelming human experience, a painting like Untitled illustrates the emotive power of pure colour to articulate a deep and innate human language . It is a work that responds to the demand that Rothko first asserted in 1948 when he wrote that 'Pictures must be miraculous ... a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.' (Mark Rothko. 'The Romantics were Prompted', Possibilities No. 1 Winter 1947/8).

Christie's. Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale. 11 February 2009. London, King Street. Image Christie's LTD 2009. www.chrisrie's.com