Mark Rothko (Daugavpils, 1903 – New York, 1970) is one of the most iconic artists of the twentieth century: beyond having revolutionized the history of painting as an indispensable reference point for a certain and well-frequented line of abstract research, his language has maintained its vitality intact with the passing of time. Beyond any historicizing consideration, his work is capable of arousing today the same emotions and the same involvement as the period in which it was a disruptive novelty. Almost twenty years after the last institutional retrospective dedicated to him in Italy (6/10/2007 – 6/01/2008 at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome), the artist is the protagonist of another project of the highest level, this time organized by Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, which in this way confirms the recent excellence of Florence in the field of contemporary art, achieved precisely through the quality of this institution’s exhibitions in a city considered for decades to be little inclined to invest in this field, being entirely devoted to the enhancement of its inestimable historical heritage.
“Rothko a Firenze”, exhibition view, Palazzo Strozzi, Museo di San Marco, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Firenze, 2026, photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi
Rothko in Florence is in itself an event, above all for the rarity of occasions in Italy to encounter an important body of works by the American painter. At a moment when, moreover, one of his monumental works, “No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe)” (1964), which has remained for almost sixty years in the collection of Agnes Gund, patron and former president of MoMA, is about to be auctioned by Christie’s with an estimate of around 80 million dollars, positioning itself to challenge the artist’s auction record. But no less significant is the incisiveness of the exhibition itinerary, whose elaboration required five years of work, in recounting the development of one of the most significant creative journeys of the twentieth century, placing it in close relation with the host city, which played such a documented and important role in orienting its direction. Curators Christopher Rothko and Elena Geuna have developed a selection of more than seventy masterworks, drawn from the most important museums and collections in the world, that illuminate the evolution of the painter’s language from his beginnings through to his final period, capturing the resonances of his travels in Tuscany and his relationship with Roman antiquity as indispensable inspirations for his research. For this reason the exhibition extends beyond the confines of Palazzo Strozzi into two special satellite sections: the cells frescoed by Beato Angelico and his workshop in the former Dominican convent of San Marco and the claustrophobic vestibule of the Biblioteca Laurenziana designed by Michelangelo Buonarroti.
“Rothko a Firenze”, exhibition view, Palazzo Strozzi, Museo di San Marco, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Firenze, 2026, photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi
The itinerary at Palazzo Strozzi unfolds chronologically through ten rooms, each conceived as a temporal phase and at the same time as a progressive sphere of sensations, in a chromatic evolution that mirrors the artist’s deepest inner journey. From the warmth of the yellows and oranges from the first abstract phase, one moves to the crimsons and reds from the classical period and the intensity of the greens and browns from the following decades, arriving finally at the last works on paper, where light blues, pale pinks and delicate Sienese earths seem to bring painting back to an archaic and meditative dimension. What surprises those who do not know Rothko’s story in depth is to discover, in the first room, how one of the most radical pioneers of American abstraction, before arriving at his unmistakable language, passed through a decade-long figurative research. His initial subjects were, in fact, nudes, urban scenes, still lifes and portraits in which the interest in the European tradition, learned self-taught at the museum, and a sensitivity to architectural space destined to return, transformed, in the color fields of maturity are already legible.
“Rothko a Firenze”, exhibition view, Palazzo Strozzi, Museo di San Marco, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Firenze, 2026, photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi
In the early 1940s the figuration, initially willful and almost Expressionist in character, becomes contaminated with the myths of classical antiquity and allows itself to be seduced by Surrealist influences. In the works from that period, such as Room in Karnak (1946) and Tiresias (1944), the legibility of the subjects dissolves into primordial psychic forms suggested by rapid marks and abrasions, revealing the painter’s torment in elaborating a language adequate to his intuitions. That tension resolves itself around 1946, when figuration seems to evaporate into the so-called Multiforms: broad, blurred, irregular color fields, apparently formless, in which the line is absorbed by light and the canvas becomes a field of pulsating energy. These are transitional works, dominated by chromatic contrasts, but already between 1948 and 1949 the surfaces become structured and simplified, the rectangles with blurred edges begin to occupy the canvas horizontally, dividing it into sections of layered light, and Rothko finds his classical format. No. 3 / No. 13 (1949), from MoMA in New York, is one of the first complete examples of that language: two superimposed color fields on a red ground (dark grey above, light green below, with a thin intermediate band) that refer to nothing external but produce an effect of immediate physical presence, as if the color itself were an animated matter that breathes.
“Rothko a Firenze”, exhibition view, Palazzo Strozzi, Museo di San Marco, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Firenze, 2026, photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi
It is at this precise moment, after the first exhibition of Multiforms at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, that Rothko makes his first trip to Europe with his wife Mell, and the stopover in Florence proves decisive. At the San Marco Dominican convent, where between 1439 and 1444 Beato Angelico had frescoed forty-four cells with ethereal tonalities of blues, pinks and ochres, Rothko stays until closing time and returns the following day, moved by that painting tending more toward presence than representation, by those bodies theologically conceived as pictorial signs[1] and by that crystalline light that blends with color in a way he himself recognizes as extraordinarily akin to his own research. It is one of the few elective affinities in the art history in which both terms seem genuinely to desire the encounter: Beato Angelico, according to Vasari, never painted a crucifix without wetting his cheeks with tears; Rothko would describe many years later the act of painting as a religious experience, renewed in the emotion of those who look. In the vestibule of Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, where the walled-up windows and the heavy immobility of the spaces convey the impression of being imprisoned with no possibility of escape, Rothko finds instead the model for that sensation of compression and gathered concentration that he would seek to translate into painting in the following years. When, in 1958, he receives the commission for the murals of the Four Seasons Restaurant in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building and constructs in his studio scaffolding of the same proportions as the restaurant’s walls, he has a clear mental image of his point of reference. He will produce more than thirty monumental panels before withdrawing from the project, refusing to consign his work to the background of a private dining room. Donated by the artist to the Tate in London, where they are displayed in a dedicated room, the Seagram Murals (1958–1959), to whose sketches a section of the exhibition is dedicated, still bear the architectural imprint of the Florentine model.
“Rothko a Firenze”, exhibition view, Palazzo Strozzi, Museo di San Marco, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Firenze, 2026, photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi
In the 1950s, as the palette shifts from luminous yellows and reds toward deeper tonalities and the paint surfaces become atmospheric and constructed through thin layers that allow light to surface from within, Rothko reaches the culmination of his maturity. Untitled (1952–1953), from the Guggenheim Bilbao – one of the most imposing works in the exhibition, almost three meters high by four and a half wide – places the viewer before something that is difficult to continue calling painting in the traditional sense of the word: two enormous superimposed color fields, bright yellow above and red-orange below, with frayed and vibrating edges, seem to expand beyond the perimeter of the canvas and physically envelop those who look at them. Rothko was very meticulous during installation in specifying the conditions for viewing his paintings. He wanted large-scale works to be installed close to the ground and observed from nearby, to encourage a physical, almost bodily relationship in which the painting ceases to be an image to be looked at and becomes a presence with which to come into contact. Before this canvas, the effect is verifiable: the light seems to radiate from within the surface, the color advances and recedes according to a logic pertaining more to sensory perception than formal analysis and the sense of immediate emotional involvement that derives from this produces an experience not easily expressed in words.
“Rothko a Firenze”, exhibition view, Palazzo Strozzi, Museo di San Marco, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Firenze, 2026, photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi
The second trip to Italy in 1959, with stops in Paestum, Pompeii, Tarquinia and Venice, steers the following years in a more crepuscular direction. The Pompeian reds, the mineral-laden yellows of the buried villas, the intense and worn tints of the Roman walls enter the bloodstream of the canvases from the late 1950s and early 1960s. The painter progressively abandon the radiance of the preceding decade for a more muted and sober register, dominated by deep greens, browns, crimsons, reds increasingly laden with dark. The palette becomes vespertine, as if the 79 AD Vesuvian eruption were continuing to burn beneath the ashes of the painting, albeit in a weakened manner. The color now seems to turn inward: instead of irradiating the viewers by propagating tentacularly, it draws them into a space of meditation that leads them to experience the painting in depth, as if it wished to subsume them within its layers.
“Rothko a Firenze”, exhibition view, Palazzo Strozzi, Museo di San Marco, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Firenze, 2026, photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi
The room dedicated to the late 1960s is perhaps the most difficult to pass through without lingering. Three large bichrome grey and black canvases occupy the space with an unprecedented and essential solemnity. In Untitled (1969), for instance, an ivory-grey field occupies the lower portion, a darker zone the upper, separated by a barely suggested margin in which the painter’s hand no longer conceals itself. The brushstrokes are perceptible, the slight imperfections of the application are not corrected, the edges of the canvas remain visible. What in the 1950s was a dusty surface almost dematerialized from within which light seemed to transpire is now a bare and severe pictorial environment, a space of gathered silence akin to that of a monastic cell. Painted in acrylic – a technique Rothko uses here for the first time on canvas, attracted by its opacity rather than its luminosity – this series was born for a room project at the Paris headquarters of UNESCO that would have seen him involved alongside Alberto Giacometti. Despite the commission never having been brought to completion, the artist produced eighteen paintings in this style in total, as if he had found in that spare register something he did not want to stop exploring. They were the last large-format canvases he managed to paint.
“Rothko a Firenze”, exhibition view, Palazzo Strozzi, Museo di San Marco, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Firenze, 2026, photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi
In the final room of the exhibition, dedicated to the works on paper from 1969 and masterfully arranged to evoke his artistic testament – the Rothko Chapel in Houston, inaugurated as a place of interreligious worship a year after his death – the artist returns to colors of unexpected delicacy. The large sheets on paper in pale blue, pale pink and Sienese earth tones, displayed in semi-darkness, seem to close the circle opened at San Marco in 1950. It is as if Rothko, in the end, prevented by his fragile state of health from practicing painting at an environmental scale, had returned to the crystalline and harmonious light that had struck him in the cells frescoed by Beato Angelico at the beginning of his career, only to discover that this had always been, at bottom, the destination, and that his inner biography too led him there. Thus concludes the itinerary at Palazzo Strozzi, at the end of which it is truly recommended to continue the experience of visiting the former Dominican convent and Biblioteca Laurenziana, where the silent Renaissance cubicles and the restless Michelangelesque vestibule will appear to us as we have never seen them, filtered through Rothko’s gaze, illuminated by his chromatic and spatial awareness, and where, conversely, it will become tangible how deeply that limpid luminosity and that architectural pressure remained imprinted, indelibly, in his painting.
[1] From the evocative description by G. Didi-Huberman in “Beato Angelico. Figure del dissimile”, trans. by P. Peroni, Milan 2009, pp. 16, 20-21 (original ed. “Fra Angelico. Dissemblance et figuration”, Paris 1990), taken up by Marco Cianchi in his essay in the catalogue, p. 168.
Info:
Rothko a Firenze
14/03 – 23/08/2026
Curated by Christopher Rothko and Elena Geuna
Palazzo Strozzi Firenze (con sezioni speciali al Museo di San Marco e alla Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana)
www.palazzostrozzi.org
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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