kind - the colourfield skeins of Morris Louis, or the black stripes of polychrome shaped canvases of Frank Stella, or the bold, black, calligraphic brushstrokes of Franz Kline - has yet to become as widely accepted as Gustav Klimt's nudes or Sandro Botticelli's Madonnas. In the art world itself, though, Mark Rothko is a highly celebrated painter. He appears in the 20th century Olympian pantheon alongside Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Mark Rothko's art has been seen by critics as 'transcendent' (Ashton, Robertson), 'a sort of spiritual Stonehenge' (Brookner), 'lavish self- indulgence' (Kozloff), 'Dionysian' (Hobbs), 'sensuous and and spiritual' (Waldman), 'enormous, beautiful, opaque surfaces' (Selz), 'enigmatic, gripping presence' (Goldwater), 'incandescent color' (Greenberg), 'haunting' (Sylvester), 'visionary simplicity' (Sandler) and 'tinted hallucinatory cloth' (de Kooning). For poet John Ashbery, Rothko 'seems to eliminate criticism'. The archetypal response to Mark Rothko's art is that it is a (1) 'heroic', (2) 'transcendent', (3) 'spiritual' and (4) 'tragic' art. These are four of the most commonly deployed adjectives in Rothko art criticism (others include 'Buddhist', 'Faustian' and 'death-conscious'). Rothko's painting is seen as (1) 'heroic' because it attempts achieve something great in a world of Existential suffering. Out the slime and the pain and the horror of modern life rise Rothko's 'heroic' canvases. His canvases become a gesture of affirmation in amongst the global angst (as with Rothko's contemporaries, such as Pollock and Newman). Includes new illustrations.