Untitled (three girls in a landscape)

Three girls stand in a landscape that is more psychological than topographical — a Rothko characteristic from the very beginning. The figures are rendered in the muted, earthy palette of his early period, but something about their arrangement and the space around them points forward. The landscape is not a setting but an emotional field, and the girls are not individuals but presences. This painting comes from the same moment as the Subway series, when Rothko was developing his core vocabulary of vertical figures in compressed spaces.

The three-figure composition would recur throughout Rothko's career in various guises. Here the figures are explicitly human; by the 1950s they will have become rectangular color fields, but the underlying structure — vertical forms in atmospheric spac — remains identical. The progression from three girls to three rectangles is shorter and more logical than it might appear.

This painting captures Rothko in the process of inventing himself. The girls in the landscape are already becoming something other than girls — they are becoming the vehicles for the emotions that Rothko would spend his career learning to express through pure color.