At GO, a lectio by Annie Cohen-Solal. The historian, essayist, exhibition curator and distinguished professor at Università Bocconi di Milano will present her Mark Rothko: come riparare il mondo (Einaudi), in conjunction with the successful exhibition dedicated to the artist currently on view at Palazzo Strozzi until 23 August 2026.

The book:

Born Marcus Rotkovitch in Dvinsk, in the Russian Empire, Mark Rothko emigrated to the United States at the age of ten. He brought with him to the New World his Talmudic education and the memories of pogroms seen through the eyes of a child.

It was the experience of displacement and the stigma of being an immigrant that would later become the driving force behind the aesthetic subversion the artist introduced into the heart of modern society. Celebrated as a pioneer of abstraction as early as the 1950s, Rothko never settled for a purely formal achievement. In fact, he never stopped grasping, earlier and more profoundly than anyone else, the sense of disorientation of a world constantly on the brink.

One need only think of the dark austerity of the Rothko Chapel, perhaps his most majestic and complete work, inaugurated in 1971 in Houston: a place of meditation that seems to emanate the anxieties and the need for hope of a dark era.

What remains in 2026 of Rothko’s relentless search at the borders of art, of his political thought, of his sense of the sacred, if not the artist’s invitation to keep going, to move forward between tragedy and hope, in an attempt to repair the world at all costs?

In these pages, Annie Cohen-Solal reveals every facet of what may be the most significant artistic personality of the twentieth century: a multidimensional intellectual, politically engaged, whose spiritual aura must be understood through the deep roots of his personal history.

The author:

Annie Cohen-Solal was born in Algiers and lives between Paris, Milan and Cortona. A historian, essayist and exhibition curator, she is distinguished professor at Università Bocconi di Milano. After earning her PhD at the Sorbonne, she taught at universities in Berlin, Jerusalem, New York and Paris, and served as cultural counsellor at the French Embassy in the United States.

Among her many books are the internationally published biographies of Jean-Paul Sartre, Leo Castelli and Mark Rothko. In Italy, her works include Sartre (1986), Americani per sempre. I pittori di un mondo nuovo (2006) and Leo & C. Storia di Leo Castelli (2010). Picasso. Una vita da straniero won the Premio Femina per la Saggistica 2021 and is being translated in many countries.