In 1968, a year after he finished his legendary series of black murals for his eponymous chapel at the Menil Collection in Houston and just a few months after suffering an aneurysm that nearly killed him, Mark Rothko turned to painting smaller pictures in acrylic on paper laid down on canvas.

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One of them combines painting and collage to create innocuously pretty abstractions that would make attractive wrapping paper.

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As painting became more difficult, he focused intently on the sleek, stylized paper cutouts he had first started experimenting with in the 1930s, using scissors to create the sinewy shapes and swaths of color that he could no longer render directly on canvas.

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