Brooklyn College in the early 1950s was one of four free public colleges in New York City; the overwhelming majority of the students were, like me, the Jewish children of first and second-generation immigrants. My parents, my brother and I left Lvov in Poland in 1939 when I was five. In New York my parents opened a small fruit and vegetable store.

In my second year, I signed up for an art history class. It was held in a large hall and took the form of lectures, where there couldn’t be much interplay between teacher and students. The man who walked in was middle-aged, barrel-chested, bald, with glasses and a pronounced Russian (possibly Yiddish?) accent. His approach was completely based on trying to understanding the social origins of art. It was definitely not a class in aesthetics — or biography. He had a serious demeanour, but was sincere and did not condescend to us. Several times that semester our assignment was to go to a particular museum and look at the paintings. “Just look,” he told us.

As far as I remember, no one in that class even knew that our teacher himself was an artist.

One day, I went to the Museum of Modern Art as he had asked us to do. Wandering around, I entered a small room, and there, covering most of one wall, was a painting signed “Mark Rothko”. Nowadays one would immediately recognise it as a Rothko painting. I was stunned. Mark Rothko — my teacher. His painting was hanging in the Museum of Modern Art. Next class day, Rothko asked if we had any questions about what we had seen. Most of us were too shy to speak up, but one intrepid student got up and said: “Yes — what is your painting about?” And Rothko replied, “I’ll answer you, but not just now.”

He was true to his word. At maybe the very next class session, Rothko started speaking. He said, “I used to paint in a very busy way. I would just exert myself and paint and paint. Then one day I paused. I stopped and said to myself, ‘Vie loifst du?’ Which for those of you who don’t know Yiddish means: ‘Where are you running to?’

“And I’ve been painting this way ever since.”

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