On 12 March 1901 the Whitechapel Art Gallery in East London first opened its doors to the public. To mark its imminent centenary, this week’s picture is Mark Rothko’s luminous – some might also say numinous – abstract painting, Number 11/ Number 20 (Untitled). It was last shown in London in 1961, on the occasion of the first serious retrospective of Rothko’s work in this country. In acknowledgement of the significance of that exhibition – one of a series of extremely influential shows put on by the Whitechapel’s then director Bryan Robertson to introduce the British public to the power and beauty of post-war American abstract art – the gallery has arranged to borrow the picture once more. It will go on view on 18 March as part of the Whitechapel’s hundredth anniversary celebrations.

Rothko painted the picture in 1949, when he was in his mid-thirties, at a moment when his art was in transition. Having long since abandoned the figurative styles of his earlier career, when he painted moody genre scenes and evocations of New York city life, followed by somewhat self-conscious pastiches of Surrealist art, the painter was struggling to create a new pictorial language for himself. He wanted to create abstract pictures which might aspire to the “tragic” and “timeless” qualities of the greatest Western art of the past – to recreate the pathos of Rembrandt or the sublimity of Michelangelo, but to do so in the terms of purely non-representational painting.

“I think of my pictures as dramas,” he was later to say, even going so far as to provide what he called (with his tongue no doubt slightly in his cheek) “the recipe of a work of art – its ingredients – how to make it – the formula”. This included “a clear preoccupation...

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