Pages: <<:1:2:3:4:5:6:7:8:9:10:11:12:13:14:15:16:17:18:19:20:21:22:--

It is unlikely that Mark Rothko, arguably the most famous cultural figure ever to be born within Latvia’s modern-day borders, would ever have considered himself Latvian. He was the son of a middle-class family from Daugavpils, then known as Dvinsk, an oasis of Jewish cosmopolitanism in Czarist Russia. In 1913, with tensions mounting from the pogroms, his family emigrated to the United States. The young boy grew up to become one of the great painters of the 50s and 60s. His giant canvases of reds, blues, yellows and greens, separated one atop the other like the clear cut of a horizon line between flat desert land and expansive skies are among the greatest works of American art of the 20th century. But there was no way anyone thought his work would make it to his birthplace within his lifetime. (He died in 1970). At one point some of his work made it to Moscow during the Khrushchev era as part of an exhibit of modern painting. The reception was hostile.