Rabbi Julia Neuberger is a member of the House of Lords

Are Jews proud of Rothko? Yes. But is he a Jewish artist? I think not. He is, rather, an artist who was Jewish. The distinction is important. His art does not seem, to me, to draw directly on the Jewish experience. He does, arguably, draw on the Jewish tradition that God is unknowable, summed up in God’s response to Moses, “I am that I am”, and the Jewish tradition that there therefore cannot be images of God. Yet Rothko’s paintings, if spiritual at all, are broader than Judaism.

They simply don’t speak to me. I get from them not that God is unknowable, or even absent, but rather that everything is difficult and dark. Perhaps absence is impossible for any painter successfully to convey, even on such big canvases as Rothko used. It is easier to capture that invisibility of God in words than pictures.

Mark Cazalet is an artist whose religious works are found in Chelmsford, Manchester and Worcester cathedrals

When it was at the old Tate Gallery, the Rothko Room with the Seagram murals was something of a shrine I used to worship at, somewhere to let go of the world around me and experience a state of transcendence. The paintings used to leave me in a very particular kind of ecstatic state, rather as if I had been listening to the music of Joy Division (who were around at the time) with the words cut out. Rothko’s work is, for me, infinitely subtle - probably the most subtle I’ve ever seen - and it begs the question as to whether any form of figurative imagery in art is any longer possible or even desirable. I experience Rothko’s abstracts as sacramental, in that they are making visible what is essentially an invisible grace, in the same way the sacraments do in Christianity.

Rukhsana Ahmad, born in Pakistan, is a playwright and novelist

Rothko’s symmetrical squares and straight lines remind me of the geometry and symmetry I was schooled to look for in Islamic art. Muslims believe divinity is exclusive to God. He is separate and different from humankind, at an infinite distance from us, yet equally near. They do not imagine or represent God in any human form; instead, Islamic art uses the abstraction and symmetry of geometry to contemplate divinity and transcend material reality. It is a form of abstraction - just as Rothko uses abstraction.

I find his symmetry pleasing. It speaks to me. Likewise, his use of colour has an emotive force. I am passionate about colour, perhaps because of my eastern side, though, for me, the intensity of Rothko’s colour cuts against the meditative quality that is integral to mystical experience.

Rev Charles Pickstone is the Anglican vicar of Catford and is organising a study day on Rothko for ACE (Art and Christian Enquiry) at King’s College London

Rothko was deeply interested in religion and hoped his paintings would enable people to experience a sense of awe. There is, at present, no satisfactory image or analogy for God available to the West after the vaporisation of the whole humanist tradition in the smoke of Hiroshima and the chimneys of Auschwitz. So a whole generation has grown up unchallenged by articulate religious expression. For them, Rothko’s paintings, with their lack of line and consequent terrible dumbness, resonate with a palpable but unnameable sense of presence. For me, though, the paintings are the tablets of stone of Mount Sinai, but with the commandments lost. They are icons of the absence of God. They awaken in us our buried grief for a childhood God.

Amrit and Rabindra Singh are British-born Sikh twin sisters whose works marry the Indian miniature tradition with modern art

Our introduction to Rothko was not a happy one. Our tutors at art college insisted we went to see his works. We sat on the bench in the centre of the Rothko Room at the Tate for a long time, meditating, but just didn’t connect spiritually with the paintings. We could understand how they might have that effect on others. In the Indian and Chinese tradition of Tantric spiritual art, there is the same simplified form and saturated colour you find in Rothko. Within our Sikh faith, however, spirituality is not just an abstract inner emotion, as Rothko seems to suggest. It is part of this world, practical, political and therefore connected to and seen in every detail of human existence. In addition, as Sikhs (as in other Indian religions), we are traditionally more attuned to associating spirituality and a sense of the divine with an aesthetic that, in total contrast to the relative starkness of Rothko, is characteristically decorative, symbolic and narrative.

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