The Geometry of Mass Graves - by Tim Barker
Most people have to go to a museum to seek out a spiritual encounter with Mark Rothko. But Antony Blinken grew up surrounded by the gauzy masterpieces. His father, Warburg-Pincus cofounder Donald Blinken, bought five canvases directly from the artist, whom he considered a friend. Rothko himself hung the paintings. Besides money, the relationship was built on shared experience. Rothko, like Donald Blinken’s father, was born in the Russian empire around the time of the Kishinev pogroms. Rothko told people he had “always been haunted” by an image from a story told to him when he was a child: local Jews driven into the woods by Cossacks and forced to dig themselves a square grave.
Did young Antony Blinken ever hear a version of this story? Did the color fields on the wall at home ever remind him of mass graves? We know that he grew up thinking about the death camps, largely through the prism of his stepfather Samuel Pisar’s experience in Majdanek and Auschwitz. As a college student, Tony Blinken described watching Salvadoran death squads on the evening news:
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