Not since 1999, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, has there been a Mark Rothko retrospective in the French capital. Twenty-four years on, 115 Rothko works from museums around the world come to the Fondation Louis Vuitton to celebrate the magisterial modernist. The exhibition begins with Rothko’s moody land and city scapes, moves through his period of myth and surrealism, then evolves into abstraction—the floating rectangles of saturated color and “the simple expression of the complex thought.” While 18 of Rothko’s “black” paintings were created for a meditative space in Houston that came to be called the Rothko Chapel, it is the late paintings themselves that are a chapel, filled as they are with mysterious light and spirit. “The people who weep before my pictures,” Rothko said, “are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” Rothko was born in 1903 and died, by his own hand, in 1970. —Elena Clavarino