Art historian explains why truly ‘reading’ Mark Rothko’s abstract paintings makes people cry

You walk into a museum, turn a corner, and there it is: a giant canvas with two or three fuzzy blocks of color and nothing else. A Mark Rothko painting. There are no people depicted. No beautiful, rolling landscapes. You have neither myth, story, nor historical context to latch onto. And nearby, bewilderingly, another viewer is wiping away tears.

If your first thought is “I could’ve painted that,” you’re in good company. Plenty of smart, curious people walk past a Rothko feeling a little dumb, a little suspicious, and secretly certain the whole thing is a bluff. “Certainly, no one likes these paintings,” you might think to yourself. “And they definitely don’t understand what’s going on.” 

That’s where an art historian on TikTok comes in. The secret to unlocking a Rothko painting, according to her? A little space and perspective, plus an open mind.

The video turning skeptics into believers

Art historian and content creator Tatyana Kalaydjian Serraino (@tatyanaaboutart) has built a massive following by doing one deceptively simple thing: taking famous paintings and revealing the raw human emotion inside them.

From Caravaggio to Goya to Edward Hopper, Tatyana expertly decodes canonical artworks, sharing vital historical context and pointing out subtle details you might have missed. Her emotionally charged, deeply researched art history explainers feel like a key into a previously unexplored world as she surfaces the tragedy, obsession, and drama embedded within each paint stroke.

Her clip on how to read a Rothko is warm, fast, and hands you something most museum wall labels seem to miss: a reason to slow down and actually feel it. Here’s the method.

Step 1: Resist the urge to say “I could paint that”

“You could probably paint rectangles,” declares Tatyana. “But I’m pretty sure you couldn’t paint a Rothko.”

This is the exact objection someone raised in a Reddit thread thirteen years ago, arguing Rothko’s canvases looked like “only a bunch of different colored rectangles, overlaid” and that his signature style “does not seem like it required much effort.” Commenters quickly set them straight. Rothko built these paintings from many thin, translucent layers of paint (a technique sometimes called scumbling) so every subtle shift of color is stacked, hand-layered depth. They certainly weren’t easy to make.

Tatyana echoes this in her video, explaining, “Rothko experimented with complex paint mixtures and painstaking layering to create colors with extraordinary depth, saturation, and luminosity. The paintings may look simple, but they absolutely aren’t.”

Step one is humility. Let yourself be surprised.

Step 2: Get uncomfortably close

“The appreciation of art is a true marriage of minds.”
–Mark Rothko

Most of us view art from a polite distance, hands behind our back. Rothko hated that. “My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes,” he once said. 

“Get nice and close,” says Tatyana, invitingly. “Rothko’s paintings are huge and that’s completely intentional.” She reveals that the Latvian-born American artist made his canvases enormous on purpose because he wanted people to stand about 18 inches away—close enough that the color fills your entire field of vision. You’re not supposed to look at a Rothko. You’re supposed to feel swallowed by it.

That’s the step Tatyana says people skip, and it’s why the comment section lit up in that Reddit thread. The skeptics who insisted they felt nothing in front of a Rothko had mostly seen them only as digital thumbnails or from across a room. The ones who’d stood right in front of one described being emotionally overwhelmed. 

One recalled seeing No. 14 at SFMOMA—a nearly nine-foot-tall intersection of sun and sea; a large swath of bright, fiery orange that rests upon a smaller, brooding and deep cobalt blue rectangle below—and walking away with a newfound appreciation for the artist. “I know this sounds crazy, but being near it was emotionally overwhelming and made me feel uneasy,” they wrote. “^Rothko instantly became one of my favorite artists after seeing one of his pieces in person.”

Step 3: Give it time

If you’ve glanced at a Rothko for 30 seconds, you haven’t really seen one.

Stand there for a few minutes. Let your eyes settle, and notice your mood start to move—almost like the color is doing something to you without asking permission. That’s not entirely your imagination. More than a century of research finds that hue, brightness, and saturation are reliably linked to how we feel, apart from any subject matter. Rothko was chasing exactly that. He was painting feelings.

“Colors hold immense power over our mood, and that was Rothko’s intention with these paintings,” Tatyana says. “Not to depict something, but to evoke a feeling, a mood… Rothko truly believed his paintings were about the biggest experiences of being human.” She goes on to quote the artist, who once said: 

“If you…are moved only by the color relationships, then you miss the point.”
–Mark Rothko

Why “just colored rectangles” make people cry

The crying is real, and it’s well-documented.

Take Emily Crews, executive director of the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion at the University of Chicago. The first time she stood before a Rothko, she wrote, she was “utterly overwhelmed with emotion,” feeling “engulfed in a way that was at once comforting and startling, intimate and yet immense.” She only realized she was crying when a stranger stopped to ask if she was okay.

Rothko would not have been surprised. He was blunt about his aim: “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom,” he told critic Selden Rodman, adding that people breaking down in front of his work proved he was “communicating those basic human emotions.”

There’s a theory for why these vibrant, soft-edged rectangles resonate so deeply. Because a Rothko gives you almost nothing to identify or analyze, your mind stops hunting for objects and turns inward. The painting becomes a kind of mirror. You’re not just seeing color. In a way, you’re meeting yourself.

Permission to feel 

Learning to stand still in front of a Rothko is really practice for paying attention anywhere: to a person, a view, a moment you’d normally rush past. Don’t believe the Reddit skeptics—Rothko’s paintings were never “just” about color. 

In an essay for Phillips, writer and researcher at Yale University Department of the History of Art, Sarah Bochicchio, argues that Rothko’s paintings function as tools that “allow us to experience a level of self-reflection” and “transcendence.”

Philosopher Federico Campagna describes Rothko’s paintings as “miraculous objects,” and “instruments” that allow us to “see something beyond words, beyond language and beyond understanding”—a school of thought consistent with Rothko’s own insistence that his work was never decorative.

Great art was never a test you could fail. Stand close, give it a minute, and let a Rothko do what it was built to do. The tears, if they do come, are just your body’s proof it worked. That’s the real gift in Tatyana’s art history videos: she’s handing you permission to feel something sublime in front of a painting you were ready to write off.

The proof, as always, is in the comment section. “Thank you!! I feel like people who don’t like them, have never seen one in person,” someone wrote beneath Tatyana’s Rothko explainer video.

“I love this. Thank you,” commented another.

“Can’t wait to do this the next time I’m in the gallery,” said one more.