Art by Mark Rothko

Rothko hated being called an abstract painter, and he was specific about why: he thought his blurred rectangles of color were about as representational as a painting could get, because what they represented was feeling (tragedy, ecstasy, doom, in his own words), and he considered anyone who saw only pretty color relationships to have missed the entire point. He wanted people to stand close, uncomfortably close, until the canvas filled their field of vision and there was nowhere else to look.

In 1958 he accepted a large commission to paint murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan's new Seagram Building, then changed his mind after actually eating dinner there. He decided the space was built for exactly the kind of wealthy indifference his paintings were supposed to interrupt, not decorate. He returned the money and kept the paintings; most of them eventually went to the Tate in London instead, arriving the same week he died.

His last major project was a chapel, not a gallery: an octagonal, non-denominational space in Houston holding fourteen of his darkest, most somber canvases, meant to be sat with rather than looked at. It opened in 1971, a year after Rothko took his own life in his New York studio. He never saw it finished.