Offered one of the most prestigious commissions in 1950s New York, murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building, Mark Rothko secretly set out to make paintings so dark and claustrophobic they would ruin diners' appetites, then returned the advance and kept the work. This episode traces how a radical, anti-religious immigrant became the creator of some of the most spiritual paintings of the 20th century, beginning with his birth as Marcus Rothkowitz in 1903 in Dvinsk, the fear of anti-Semitism, the family's move to Portland, Oregon, and his father's death months after they reunited.

We follow his rejection of the synagogue, his teenage immersion in syndicalist union politics, his alienation at Yale, and the accidental moment at the Art Students League that made him an artist. From there we cover his study under Max Weber, t ...