In the pivotal year of 1949, Rothko distanced himself from his Surrealist-inspired work of the 1940s and began to explore pure abstraction by painting soft-focus squares in diaphanous colors. 1949 is also the year that Matisse's 1911 painting The Red Studio, in which the artist's room is subsumed by a brilliant field of solid Venetian red, went on view at the Museum of Mod...
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