Mark Rothko: 1961 Tranquil, transcendent. 2008 Routine, repetitive

The Times, 26 September 2008Sometime in the early summer of 1961 the Whitechapel Gallery staged an exhibition of Mark Rothko, then quite recently famous, and well into what is known as his "signature style": large, unframed canvases of vertical format, painted with symmetrical rectangular blocks of contrasting colours. Rothko had hit on this idiom some 14 years before, when he often used the