Mark Rothko

Known for: the color field paintings; the Seagram Murals

Mark Rothko developed his mature style of large, soft-edged rectangles of luminous color in the late 1940s, describing the works as expressions of basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom — rather than abstract exercises. His Seagram Murals (1958–59), commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York and subsequently withdrawn by Rothko and donated to the Tate Modern, are among the most ambitious and discussed works in postwar American painting. He died by suicide in his New York studio in 1970.