In the late 1940s and 50s, Mark Rothko (1903-70) was one of the leading American artists who created wall-scale abstract paintings that filled the viewer's field of vision and became a form of environment. Rothko spoke of wanting the spectator to feel inside the pictorial space, enveloped in his canvases' luminous colour and apparitional surfaces. Together with painters such as Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, he wanted to express a sense of the sublime, an idea associated with religious awe, vastness and natural magnificence.
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