Rothko - Tate Modern:

Rothko was influenced in this body of work by Michelangelo's Laurenhian Libarary in Florence, with its blind windows and deliberately  oppressive atmosphere. Rothko commented that Michelangelo ' achieved  just the kind of feeling i'm after- he makes the viewer feel like they are trapped in a room where all the windows and doors are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall'

'Public Display - Tate Modern' 

              

In his mature work, Rothko abandoned specific reference to nature in order to paint images with universal association. by the late 1940s he had developed a style in which Hazy, luminous rectangles flout within a vertical format. Rothko wrote that the great artistic achievements of the past where picture f the human figure alone in a moment of utter immobility. he sought to create his own version of this solitary meditative experience, scaling his picture so that the viewer in enveloped in the subtly shifting, atmospheric surface.