Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko (born September 25, 1903, Dvinsk, Russian Empire [now Daugavpils, Latvia]—died February 25, 1970, Manhattan, New York, U.S.) was an American painter whose works introduced contemplative introspection into the melodramatic post-World War II Abstract Expressionist school. His use of color as the sole means of expression led to the development of Color Field Painting.

Early life and education

Rothko was born Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, then a shtetl, or a small Jewish village, in the Pale of Settlement, a district in imperial Russia where Jewish people were allowed to settle. He was the youngest of four children of Jacob Rothkowitz, who was a pharmacist, and Anna Goldin Rothkowitz. Rothko later described his father as “violently anti-religious,” and though the three eldest Rothkowitz children were educated in public schools, Markus was sent to heder, an elementary school for Jewish children. In 1910 Jacob Rothkowitz decided to move the family to the United States, fearing the pogroms directed at Jewish people in neighboring shtetls and the threat that his two eldest sons, Moise and Albert, would be drafted into the imperial military. He traveled to Portland, Oregon, where his brother Samuel Weinstein had established a thriving wholesale clothing business. Moise and Albert Rothkowitz arrived in 1913, followed by Anna, Markus, and Markus’s elder sister, Sonia, a few months later.

Seven months after the family was reunited, Jacob Rothkowitz died from colon cancer, and Markus Rothkovitz and his siblings were obliged to take jobs to supplement the family income. As a young Jewish refugee, Rothkowitz never felt he fit into American culture, and he bore into adulthood a grudge against his father, later saying, “I was never able to forgive his transplantation to a land where [I] never felt entirely at home.” Rothkowitz nonetheless picked up the language quickly and did exceedingly well in his studies. He earned a scholarship to Yale University in 1921, but he disliked what he perceived as the school’s elitism and anti-Semitism. Rothkowitz dropped out after two years and eventually settled in New York City. He took classes at the Art Students League, where he studied briefly under the painter Max Weber, though he always considered himself essentially self-taught.

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Early art career and personal life

Rothkowitz’s early art career was marked by almost two decades of experimentation and tumult before he landed on his signature style. Throughout the 1920s and ’30s he supported his artmaking by working odd jobs, teaching children’s art at the Brooklyn Jewish Center, and in the late 1930s participating in the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. He also received a commission to illustrate The Graphic Bible by popular author and rabbi Lewis Browne, but he lost the lawsuit he filed in 1928 against Browne and the publisher for not giving Rothkowitz credit or full payment for the illustrations he completed. That same year, however, Rothkowitz showed his work for the first time in a group exhibition, at the Opportunity Galleries, New York. During this period he took a realistic approach to art, painting classic still lifes, landscapes, and genre scenes.

In 1932 Rothkowitz married jewelry designer Edith Sachar (divorced 1945), and the following year he had his first solo shows, at the Portland Art Museum and at the Contemporary Arts Gallery, New York. By the end of the decade his realistic works culminated in his Subway series, showing the loneliness of persons in drab urban environments. The Subway series gave way in the early 1940s to the semiabstract biomorphic forms of the ritualistic Baptismal Scene (1945). Rothkowitz exhibited these works with artists William Baziotes and Adolph Gottlieb, with whom he founded the Ten, an artist collective. His work was shown in a solo exhibition at Art of This Century, Peggy Guggenheim’s New York gallery, and the following year an exhibition of his oil and watercolor paintings was held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. About 1940 Rothkowitz began using the name Mark Rothko, though he did not legally change his name until 1959.

Rothko’s classic paintings

In 1947 and 1949 Rothko taught at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, where he met artist Clyfford Still. By then, Rothko had married (1945) Mary Beistle, with whom he later had two children, Kathy Lynn (“Kate”) Rothko (1950) and Christopher Rothko (1963). During this period Rothko moved from figural paintings toward an art that he felt could express universal human drama. He arrived at a highly personal form of Abstract Expressionism. Unlike many of his fellow Abstract Expressionists, Rothko never relied on such techniques as violent brushstrokes or dripping and splattering of paint. Instead, his virtually gestureless paintings achieve their effects by juxtaposing large areas of melting colors that seemingly float parallel to the picture plane in an indeterminate, atmospheric space. Rothko spent the rest of his life refining this basic style through continuous simplification. He restricted his designs to two or three “soft-edged” rectangles that nearly fill the wall-sized vertical formats like monumental abstract icons. Despite their large size, however, his paintings create a remarkable sense of intimacy from the play of nuances within color. Yet Rothko always insisted that his works were not simply about color but also about human drama. He allegedly declared to art critic Selden Rodman, “I am not an abstractionist.…I’m not interested in relationships of color or form.…I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.…And if you…are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!”

The Four Seasons Restaurant and other commissions

Beginning in 1959 Rothko received a series of commissions, for which he moved from the bright palette that had dominated his work through the decade to deeper and more somber colors, such as violets, maroons, blacks, and olive greens. The first commission was to create a series of paintings for the Four Seasons Restaurant in the newly constructed Seagram Building, New York. Always demanding about the way in which his works were exhibited, Rothko reneged on the commission when he determined the space was inappropriate for the display of his paintings. The next two commissions came from Harvard University in 1961 to create murals for the Holyoke Center and from the Menil family in 1964 to paint work for a nondenominational chapel being constructed in Houston (it was named the Rothko Chapel after the artist’s death). The latter paintings were virtual monochromes of darkly glowing browns, maroons, reds, and blacks. Their somber intensity reveals the deep mysticism of Rothko’s later years.

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Last series and personal life

After suffering a heart attack in the late 1960s Rothko rejected recommendations to stop drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes. He struggled to paint the large canvases he had grown accustomed to making and began creating luminous works on paper. His last major series abandoned floating planes of color and moved toward two simple horizontal bands, the top painted brown or black and the bottom gray. Plagued by ill health, the recent separation from his wife, and the belief that he had been forgotten by those artists who had learned most from his painting, Rothko died by suicide in 1970.

The Rothko case

After his death, the execution of Rothko’s will provoked one of the most spectacular and complex court cases in the history of modern art, lasting for 11 years (1972–82). Although there had been demand for his art, Rothko, ever concerned about the display of his pieces, had hoarded his works, which numbered 798 paintings in his possession at his death, as well as many sketches and drawings. His daughter accused the executors of the estate (Bernard J. Reis, Theodoros Stamos, and Morton Levine) and Frank Lloyd, owner of Marlborough Galleries in New York City, of conspiracy and conflict of interest in selling the works—in effect, of enriching themselves. The courts decided against the executors and Lloyd, who were heavily fined. Lloyd was tried separately and convicted on criminal charges of tampering with evidence. In 1979 a new board of the Mark Rothko Foundation was established, and all the works in the estate were divided between the artist’s two children and the foundation. In 1984 the foundation’s share of works was distributed to 19 museums in the United States, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Israel; the best and the largest proportion went to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.