Mark Rothko, 1958 Jewish identity increasingly figures in new histories of modernism in general, analyses of American art, and, recently, abstract expressionism.1 Although abstract paintings have signified "Jewishness" only since the late sixties, this essay looks at the antecedents of such re-identification in one canonical figure, Mark Rothko, examining three paintings from a narrow range of time in the early days of World War II. Absence and its tropes figure as major themes in Holocaust studies in the examination of postwar cultural production, a field that turns its gaze primarily to literature and film.2 sometimes visual art is included in this discourse, such as Morris Louis's early abstractions, the Charred Journal series (1951).3 However, most studies of Jewish visual artists issue from the field of art history, focusing on artists' Jewish identity, and may or may not include the Holocaust or antisemitism as major issues shaping their work.4 When the Holocaust structures artwork in a major way, it is often through this notion of absence, referring to both the lost Jews of World War II and the cultural future they would have carried with them, elaborated and developed had they lived.