Mark Rothko

Two or three rectangles with soft edges. That is all. And yet he asked that you stand forty-five centimetres from the canvas — close enough that the colour fills your field of vision and the surface begins to breathe. Rothko refused to have the work called abstract. It was not about relations of colour, he said, but about basic human emotion: tragedy, ecstasy, doom. That people wept in front of the paintings was the intention. Commissioned in 1958 to make murals for a restaurant in the Seagram Building, he broke the contract and returned the money rather than become the backdrop to a rich man's dinner. He died in his New York studio in 1970.