Mark Rothko’s Politics: How the Protest-Minded Artist Controlled How His Work Was Seen

For many, Mark Rothko’s transcendent abstractions of fields of intermingling colors often conjure semi-religious states and lofty ideas about death and passing on. Looking at them, one might not know that the artist was a political person, with a strict moral and ethical code that guided how his work was presented. Impressed by Rothko’s commitment to his politics, the collector Dominique de Menil, who commissioned the Abstract Expressionist to make his masterwork, the Rothko Chapel i