A Mark Rothko feast is reopening one of Rome's top culture venues this weekend - the renovated Palazzo delle Esposizioni complex.
The retrospective, which runs from Saturday until January 6, features around 70 of the American artist's paintings, loaned by his heirs, private collectors and top international museums.
The last time Italy devoted a major show to this pioneer of abstract expressionism was at the Venice Biennale in 1970, shortly after his death - so the homage is long overdue.
The show is curated by German art critic Oliver Wick, who said "Rothko loved Italy, visited it several times and was profoundly influenced by the art he saw here, especially Fra Angelico".
"In exchange, Italy helped lift Rothko to artistic stardom".
A show of his paintings at the 1958 Venice Biennale helped establish Rothko's name with the European art world.
"Fittingly, we decided to recreate Venice's Rothko Room for this retrospective. It makes up a kind of chapel in the vaulting cathedral that is the Palazzo delle Espozioni," Wick said.
The show kicks off with one of Rothko's first monumental frescos, Untitled (no.10), from 1952.
"This long-unsung work would fetch a fortune if it were ever put on sale," said Wick, recalling the postwar record of $73 million paid for his White Center - an even earlier work - in New York in May.
The untitled fresco - "a seductive journey into dreadful beauty, the world's terror," Wick said - has been loaned from the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
Wick paid tribute to the "generosity" of other museums in Australia, Canada and the United States, as well as London's Tate Gallery.
The exhibition ends with Rothko's late Black on Grey series, "a scream of pain from an artist in failing health, oppressed by the art market."
The 66-year-old Rothko slit his arms and took a fatal dose of antidepressants on February 25, 1970, shortly after finishing them.
The long-awaited reopening of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni - an acclaimed work of the 19th-century architect Pio Piacentini - is one of the flagship events of the autumn art season.
The Via Nazionale landmark is blasting back into life by offering not just Rothko but also a look back at American movie great Stanley Kubrick, also until January 6, and a retrospective on Italian sculptor Mario Ceroli, until December 2.
