How Rothko become the mythic superman of mystical abstraction

Mark Rothko was an abstract artist who didn’t see himself as an abstract artist — or at least not in any ‘formalist’ sense. If a critic called him a ‘colourist’, he would bristle; if they admired his sense of composition, he would complain that this was not what he was about at all. His was an art of deep content, his subject an invocation of the religious, the tragic, the mythic. ‘The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them,’ he once famously said. ‘And if you, as you say, are moved only by their colour relationships, then you miss the point.’

But you don’t have to go all the way to the Rothko Chapel in Houston, which houses the artist’s 14 monumental black paintings, to get the sense of a religious encounter. At The Hague’s Gemeentemuseum an extraordinary one-off exhibition follows the arc of his late-blooming career through to its end, the end being not a brooding black painting but one final burst of rich colour — a bright red canvas that follows a long parade of increasingly sombre paintings.