Mark Rothko: Towards the Light in the Chapel

By Annie Cohen-Solal
Yale University Press, £18.99

The adjectives "spiritual", "ethical", "religious" - and indeed the word "Jewish" - make frequent appearances in this new biography (part of Yale's Jewish Lives series) of one of the acknowledged giants of post-war American art. At one point, the author even claims that the Jews' "complex relationship to the Talmud is in fact a key to understanding the life and work of Mark Rothko." Elsewhere, she quotes Irving Howe's claim that, "to become an avant-garde painter means to become an avant-garde Jew".

Yet, frustratingly, Cohen-Solal makes no concerted attempt to pursue such sweeping statements, or to analyse the precise nature of the artist's sense of Jewishness and - most importantly - how it might or might not manifest itself in his art. Indeed, the art itself often seems sidelined, given short shrift compared with Cohen-Solal's interest in placing Rothko's life in a wider (but often already familiar) context.

Even here, she spends too little time, I think, probing such fascinating cultural issues as the tendency of so many modern Jewish artists to see art as a deeply moral activity; the possible links between abstraction and Jewishness; or the utterly disproportionate number of Jews - not only artists, but dealers, critics, collectors and curators - active in the New York art world.