AllMovie

Like fellow American artist Jackson Pollock, painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970) built his reputation during the immediate post-WWII years for his broadly-scaled abstract paintings. Rothko's chief goal lay in using the artworks, with their layered shapes, colors and textures, to elicit a spectrum of raw human emotions - from fear to anger to ecstasy to melancholia, and everything in-between. Ontologically, he sought complete envelopment of the spectator in the aesthetic tableaux at hand. This transcontinentally-produced 2000 documentary relays the chronological tale of Rothko's life as it discusses the gradual development of his artistry over the passage of time; it uses as a thematic touchstone the fact that one of Rothko's ongoing quests involved the pursuit of the perfect "space" in which to showcase his artwork (hence the "rooms" of the title). Interviews with the artist's son and daughter, Christopher and Kate, are featured, in addition to discussions with Rothko's close friends, acquaintances and colleagues in the art world, and a host of art historians. The late architect Philip Johnson is one of the interviewees.