Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel, the French cultural historian Annie Cohen-Solal’s new biography on the artist, focuses on his Jewish identity. Cohen-Solal theorizes that Rothko was a “passeur,” someone who traveled between cultures and navigated their differences, which enabled him to become “an agent of transformation” through his art. Cohen-Solal traces his life from birth in Dvinsk, Latvia, to childhood immigration to America and emergence as an avant-garde artist, emphasizing experiences she claims unsettled Rothko and furthered his passage among cultures. Sometimes, though, she leaps over experiences such as his first marriage to a Jewish woman (barely mentioned) or the quarter-century spent teaching in a Jewish school, presumably because they do not fit her central theme.

Cohen-Solal focuses on the class differences and humiliations she believes Rothko suffered as a young man among rich German Jews and prosperous cousins, as well as his exposure to anti-Semitism in high school and at Yale. But to many Jewish-American readers, the story of Rothko’s early twentieth-century youth will have a familiar ring from family histories: roots in the Pale of Settlement (western Russia), displacement and early struggle, anti-Semitism, and eventual assimilation.

It seems to this reader that when confronted with these issues, Rothko pushed back, propelled by a formidable ego. He barreled through his professional life in the Jewish tradition of the tzadik, or righteous person. Again and again he opposed the status quo. Excluded from the debate club in high school, he