The surfaces of Mark Rothko's canvases loom large, impenetrable and formidable, inviting you in but simultaneously denying you entry. Their deceptive simplicity has long posed a riddle to those who stand before them.

Since the American artist's death in 1970, his major works have been split between art museums on different continents, and rarely have art lovers had a chance to see a large number of Rothkos together in one exhibition. Now they can at Chiba's Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art in the exhibition "Mark Rothko," showing till June 7.

Rothko was born Marcus Rothkowitz in 1903 in the part of the former Russian Empire known as Latvia, and emigrated to the United States as a child, where he shortened his name. Bright and quick, he earned a scholarship to Yale University but dropped out and later studied art in New York. His earliest works, urban landscapes and Expressionist interiors, gave way to more colorful scenes of nature under the tutelage of his teacher Milton Avery, before he embarked on a period of Surrealist works heavily influenced by the contemporary European art that he saw in the city's galleries and museums.