Melt the world away, lose its details, dissolve its borders; it doesn’t sound like such an unwelcome prospect right now. The most substantial Mark Rothko retrospective in a generation has opened at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, and it is a show of monumental dispersion: a pull-out-all-the-stops blockbuster where life passes into vapor. From 1949, when his early figurative pictures finally liquefied into stains of translucent color, Rothko painted with no allusions, no particulars. A lot of people find his large paintings consoling, or seek the Romantic sublime in the depths of his reds and violets. “Behind the color lies the cataclysm,” he said in 1959 — a citation that rarely makes the auction preview catalogs.

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Persons: Rothko, Fondation Louis Vuitton, ”, it’s, Frank Gehry Organizations: Fondation, Art Basel, National Gallery of Art, Whitney, Fondation Vuitton, Boulogne Locations: Paris, Washington, New York, Bois