Join National Gallery of Art associate curator Adam Greenhalgh for a revealing look at paintings and drawings, both beloved and lesser-known, by abstract expressionist artist Mark Rothko (1903–1970). Rothko’s prolific output spanned decades, and an untitled 1958 painting from the National Gallery of Art’s collection is included in the Anchorage Museum’s current exhibition Cold War to the Cosmos as an example of how freedom of artistic expression played a key role in the cultural campaign of the Cold War.
In this talk, Greenhalgh will consider how Rothko’s figurative subjects from the 1930s and his mythical and classical themes of the 1940s resonated with anxieties caused by period geopolitics. These formative works paved the way for the engagement of his best-known abstract paintings of the 1950s and 1960s with what the artist considered to be the universal tragic nature of human experience, inflected as it was at mid-century by the threat of war, persecution, genocide, and potential atomic annihilation.
Free. Registration recommended but not required. Presented in conjunction with Cold War to the Cosmos, now on view on the third floor.
About the Speaker
Adam Greenhalgh is associate curator in the department of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery of Art. He has been lead author since January 2015 of the catalogue raisonné Mark Rothko: The Works on Paper. He recently curated Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper, which opened at the National Gallery in November 2023, before traveling to the National Museum, Oslo, in summer 2024, and the author of the companion book, which was shortlisted for the 2025 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award. Previously, he curated the exhibition The Serial Impulse at Gemini G.E.L. (2015), cocurated the exhibition Yes, No, Maybe: Artists Working at Crown Point Press (2013), and coauthored the accompanying catalog. He has published on American art in numerous journals and exhibition and collection catalogs. Adam has worked at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. He received his PhD from the University of Maryland, his MA from Williams College, and his BA from the University of Virginia.