In the previous chapter I discussed Mark Rothko's paintings for the Four Seasons Restaurant. To reiterate, in 1958 Rothko was commissioned by the Seagram Company to provide a number of paintings to decorate the restaurant of their new office building in East 52nd Street, New York. One of those paintings, Black on Maroon, is the example for study in this chapter on expression. The painting, which dates from 1959, is large: 228.6 cm × 207 cm. It has a dark maroon rectangle painted on a lighter maroon background. On this darker rectangle are two even lighter rectangles, positioned vertically. What are we to make of this painting? What has this painting to do with expression? In answering the first of these questions, it is worth our considering the whole issue of non-figurative art. Once we have done that, we can return to the issue of expression.

In the Republic, Plato compares painting to “holding a mirror up to nature” (596d). A painting captures the appearance of a scene or an object, and evaluating that painting is largely a matter of judging how well or badly that appearance has been captured. As we saw in the previous chapter, artistic value is going to involve a more complicated story than that (and it is worth bearing in mind that Plato did not intend his analogy to be flattering) but this characterization will suit our purposes for the moment.