Number 19

Like many of the New York School painters of the 1940s, Mark Rothko was largely influenced by Surrealism, creating symbolic abstractions comprised of biomorphic and mythological forms. By 1947 he abandoned such suggestive imagery and began working exclusively with how ideas of color, light, and space could be manifested in paint. Number 19 follows the characteristic format of his transitional canvases, in which loosely defined shapes hover against a thinly brushed background. Color had become a defining force for Rothko, as had the atmospheric—even ghostly—layering of oil paint, which would lead to his signature color-field of the 1950s.