Mark Rothko

Washington, District of Columbia, United States

Originating venue

Organized by the National Gallery of Art, this was the most comprehensive Rothko exhibition since the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s 1978 retrospective. Altogether 114 works, including 28 works on paper, were shown in Washington. The exhibition traveled to New York, where additional important watercolors from the mid-1940s—Baptismal Scene, Entombment I, and Vessels of Magic—were presented, and went on to a third venue in Paris, which included just five works on paper. In addition to the National Gallery’s holdings, Mark Rothko drew on significant loans from the family of the artist and from other public and private collections in Europe, Japan, and the United States. The exhibition was curated by Jeffrey Weiss, then at the National Gallery of Art.