Volume 25, Number 20 · December 21, 1978
Blue Chip Sublime
By Robert Hughes
The Legacy of Mark Rothko
by Lee Seldes
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 372 pp., $14.95
Mark Rothko: 1903-1970, A Retrospective
by Diane Waldman
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 296 pp., $14.85
On the morning of February 25, 1970, Mark Rothko's body was found in his studio in New York. He had done a thorough job of killing himself the night before, like Seneca but without the bath; first gulping down an overdose of barbiturates and then hacking through his elbow veins with a razor. He lay, fat and exsanguinated, clad in long underwear and black socks, in the middle of a lake of blood; and this miserable death not only cast a lurid glare of publicity over his work, but seemed to write the colophon to a period of American art, marking the end of Abstract Expressionism. Now most of its major figures except Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Lee Krasner were dead, whether by their own hand (Arshile Gorky) or violent accident (Jackson Pollock, David Smith) or booze, old age, the usual debilities.
Review, 4244 words
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