<DIV>Mark Rothko belongs to the generation of American artists who completely revolutionized the essence of abstract painting. His stylistic evolution, from a figurative visual repertoire to an abstract style rooted in the active relationship of the observer to the painting, embodied the radical vision of a renaissance in painting. Rothko characterized this relationship as aconsummated experience between picture and onlooker. His color formations indeed draw the observer into a space filled with an inner light. He was mainly concerned with the viewers experience, the merging of work and recipient beyond verbal comprehension. Rothko was an intellectual, a thinker, a highly educated man. He loved music and literature and was very involved in philosophy, especially in the works of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and of ancient Greek philosophy and mythology. Rothko was a protagonist within the movement of American painters who became known as the Abstract Expressionists.</div>