If there was one artist of recent times who embraced the largeness, the profundity, the inherent spirituality and tragic propensity of art with a capital A, it was Mark Rothko. Had he taken art a little less seriously he might have had a longer, happier life. But his unalloyed, tragic high seriousness is a large part of his appeal.

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Just as you can lose yourself in a good book or a great piece of music, so the process of looking at art can be all-absorbing. You may come to a painting or a piece of sculpture wondering how you can bear to look at it for more than a few seconds, but if you really enter into it, you won’t be able to drag yourself away.

With that sense of absorption, comes a search for spiritual significance. While the antics of lesser artists keep us entertained, it is the larger talents who step up to fulfil this need. Rothko is the kind of artist who asks big questions about the nature of existence.