Though it was still crucial to Mark Rothko’s canvases of the mid-1940s, subject matter is elusive in this untitled work of 1947. Rothko sought to convey universal emotions and the essence of our collective unconscious in these swirling environments. Prefigured in this canvas are the horizontal divisions and luminescent quality of his later meditative abstractions, through which he expressed “the basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.”