BREAKING #322

Mark Rothko in Florence

Nicole Ex

Column

June 2026

Nicole Ex

is a writer, art historian, and founder of See All This art magazine. Since 2020, she writes a weekly column for the BREAKING-the-week art newsletter.

Column

June 2026

In 1950, shortly after the death of his mother, Mark Rothko sailed to Europe aboard Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth. For five months he travelled with his wife through France, England and Italy, where, in mourning, he visited hundreds of depictions of the Madonna. ‘But everything I saw was a symbol,’ he later wrote. ‘Never did I see the concrete expression of motherhood.’

That changed at the Museo di San Marco in Florence. There he encountered Fra Angelico’s Annunciation and the frescoes in the monastery’s individual cells: each room a world unto itself, containing a single image and a single beam of daylight. When Rothko returned to New York, he translated that experience into American abstraction.

From 1951 onwards, he began painting the colour fields for which he became famous: transparent layers of paint building into softly edged, floating horizontal forms within a rectangular frame. In them, one can recognise the contemplative atmosphere of the Florentine monastic cells. And it is precisely in those cells that Rothko’s work is being shown this summer.

I visited the exhibition Mark Rothko at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2023. More than a hundred paintings were crammed into overcrowded galleries. It felt like a display of power: loans gathered from across the world at the expense of the work itself. Paintings that require silence had become decorative fields of colour in tasteful shades.

The first time I saw a Rothko was in 1988 at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. My mother and I had driven there together. We followed Rothko’s development from room to room and sat mesmerised on a bench in front of one of his colour fields. It would be the last exhibition I ever saw with her. A year later, in 1989, we lost her to a self-chosen death.

Until yesterday, when I read the Financial Times review of the Rothko exhibition, I had never realised what the grief for his mother had set in motion in Rothko. Not images of Madonna’s, but luminous fields that seem to glow with a sense of nearness. Today I found myself wondering what my mother’s death had brought me. I finally bought the exhibition catalogue we had left behind all those years ago.

— Nicole Ex
editor-in-chief

Rothko in Florence, featuring 70 works across Palazzo Strozzi, the Museo di San Marco and the Vestibule of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, is on view until 23 August. More information: palazzostrozzi.org