Living colour: how Mark Rothko found light in his dark final years

A new exhibition of the American master’s lesser-known paintings shows his changing approach to the canvas – and his attitude to death, says his sonMark Rothko’s final decade is typically thought of as a journey into darkness, when the American abstract expressionist’s furnace-bright hues of the 1950s all but vanished. His canvases, huge as stage curtains, grew doomy with maroons, browns and blacks. The great smouldering Seagram murals, commissioned for a corporate dining