DALLAS — Mark Rothko’s “A Last Supper” sold for $1.455 million to lead Heritage Auctions’ American Art sale on November 4, which totaled $6,902,000. Prominent artists of the era grappled with the atrocities of the two world wars via radical new forms and languages, and Rothko was no exception. At the time, the young artist’s paintings reflected his concerns about both the spiritual vacuum faced by humanity and the genocidal atrocities taking place in Europe. He leaned into European Expressionism, Cubism and Surrealism in his effort to communicate something urgent amid turmoil. “A Last Supper” was one of the few private loans in a recent major Rothko retrospective at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, and it marks his trajectory from figurative to abstract painter. The painting combines sharp expressionist figuration of five seated men backgrounded by large sections of washy color. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Rothko (American, 1903-1970), a non-practicing Jew in New York, was increasingly certain of the necessity of myth to redeem a spiritually depleted population. Inspired by Nietzsche’s book The Birth of Tragedy and Greek tragedians, Rothko set about drawing on religious myth to create a new kind of meaningful art. Prices include buyer’s premium as quoted by the auction house. For information, 214-409-1425 or www.ha.org.