Rothko, Mark (1903–1970). Russian-born American painter, one of the outstanding figures of Abstract Expressionism and one of the creators of Colour Field Painting. He was born Marcus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk and emigrated to the USA in 1913; he changed his name at about the same time that he acquired American citizenship in 1938. After dropping out of Yale University in 1923 he moved to New York and studied at the Art Students League under Max Weber, but he regarded himself as essentially self-taught as a painter. In the 1930s and 1940s he went through phases influenced by Expressionism and Surrealism, but from about 1947 he began to develop his mature and distinctive style. Typically his paintings feature large rectangular expanses of colour arranged parallel to each other, usually in a vertical format. The edges of these shapes are softly uneven, giving them a hazy, pulsating quality, and they seem to gently hover or float over the canvas. His paintings are often very large and the effect they produce is one of calmness and contemplation, but in spite of their tranquillity, they cost him enormous emotional effort: ‘I'm not an abstract artist … I'm not interested in the relationship of colour or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate these basic human emotions … The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience as I had when I painted them.’

Rothko was poor for much of his career (from 1929 to 1959 he earned at least part of his living by teaching art), but his reputation grew in the 1950s and in 1961 he was given a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The catalogue introduction, by Peter Selz, is written in a fulsome style that immediately attracted parody and set the tone for much subsequent writing on Rothko, who probably inspired more over-the-top prose than any other artist of his time. A sample from Selz is: ‘Unlike the doors of the dead which were meant to shut out the living from the place of absolute night, even of patrician death, these paintings—open sarcophogi—moodily dare, and thus invite the spectator to enter their orifices.’ In spite of his soaring reputation (and the money it brought), Rothko was plagued by depression. He had a prickly temperament, drank heavily, took barbiturates to excess, was fearful and suspicious of younger artists, had two unhappy marriages, and felt he was misunderstood (he disliked having his work discussed in formalist terms). Robert Hughes writes: ‘In the studio, Rothko was a man of resolution: one of the last artists in America to believe, with his entire being, that painting could carry the load of major meanings and possess the same comprehensive seriousness as the art of fresco in the sixteenth century or the novel in nineteenth-century Russia. Outside its door, he dithered. The least eddy on the surface of the day, a misplaced phone call or a mislaid bank statement, could drop him into the Black Hole.’ His early works had often been bright and vivid in colour, but from the 1950s they became increasingly sombre, typically employing blacks, browns, and maroon. He regarded his fourteen paintings for a non-denominational chapel in Houston, Texas (now known as the Rothko Chapel), 1967–9, as his masterpieces. His last paintings include a series of stark black on grey canvases that suggest his painful state of mind leading up to his suicide (he slashed his veins in his studio).

Rothko's reputation stands high, but he has not been without detractors. After visiting an exhibition of his work in 1972, Keith Vaughan wrote: ‘Feeble stuff. Large decor. Boring to paint and look at. Not surprising he killed himself if that was all there was to do.’

Mark Rothko

The American painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970) was one of the original abstract expressionists who emerged in New York after World War II. His mature painting emphasized pure color.

Mark Rothko was born on Sept. 25, 1903, in Gvinsk, Russia, and emigrated to the United States in 1913. He attended Yale University (1921-1923), and he began painting in 1925, when he studied with Max Weber at the Art Students League in New York. He later traveled extensively in Europe.

In 1935 Rothko cofounded "The Ten," an organization of expressionist artists in New York. During 1936 and 1937 he worked on the government's Federal Arts Project. In 1948 he joined Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, and William Baziotes in founding a New York art school called "Subjects of the Artist." For extensive periods throughout his career Rothko taught at colleges and universities, including the Center Academy in Brooklyn (1929-1952), the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (summers of 1947 and 1949), Brooklyn College (1951-1954), the University of Colorado (1955), and Tulane University (1956).

Rothko's first important one-man show in 1945 at the Art of This Century Gallery in New York City established him as a leading figure in postwar American painting. During the 1940s and 1950s he exhibited regularly. In 1958 his work was included in the Venice Biennale, and in 1961 the Museum of Modern Art in New York City held a retrospective exhibition. Among Rothko's special awards were his election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1968 and the honorary degree of doctor of fine arts from Yale University in 1969. Rothko committed suicide in New York on Feb. 25, 1970.

Like nearly all the advanced American painters who matured during the 1940s, Rothko's early work was founded on the tenets of both cubism and surrealism. This meant that his art leaned both toward the problems of formal abstraction and toward a more traditional notion of conceptualized subject matter. By the late 1940s, however, he gradually broke through to a style that rejected both cubism and surrealism, and his work became linked with the abstract expressionism of men like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Rothko's bestknown paintings of the 1950s and 1960s continued to be associated with this general style.

But Rothko's art reveals a distinct and personal interpretation of the abstract expressionist style. From his first emergence as a mature artist, he eschewed the gestural brushwork and the dense, painterly surfaces that became celebrated in the work of De Kooning, Franz Kline, and others. Instead, Rothko concentrated on expression through color alone, and to this end he radically simplified his imagery. In his best paintings, the imagery consists of two or three rectangles of color that float within an abstract space. Generally, the areas of color dissolve softly into one another, denying all traces of either hard or tactile edges. The softness is a function of the artist's delicate, feathery brushstrokes, and it results in an expanding pictorial space that seems to consist of pure color rather than colored objects. In many of Rothko's paintings his colors appear to generate their own magical or divine light.

Further Reading

The catalog of Rothko's Museum of Modern Art retrospective exhibition, Mark Rothko, by Peter Selz (1961) is especially rich with illustrations. Rothko's place within the abstract expressionist movement is presented in Barbara Rose, American Art since 1900 (1967). □

Rothko, Mark (b Dvinsk [now Daugavpils, Latvia], 25 Sept. 1903; d New York, 25 Feb. 1970). Russian-born American painter, one of the outstanding figures of Abstract Expressionism and one of the creators of Colour Field Painting. He emigrated to the USA as a child in 1913. After dropping out of Yale University in 1923 he moved to New York and studied at the Art Students League under Max Weber, but he regarded himself as essentially self-taught as a painter. In the 1930s and 1940s he went through phases influenced by Expressionism and Surrealism, but from about 1947 he began to develop his distinctive mature style. Typically his paintings feature large rectangular expanses of colour arranged parallel to each other, usually in a vertical format. The edges of these shapes are softly uneven, giving them a hazy, pulsating quality, and they seem to gently hover or float over the canvas. The paintings are often very large and the effect they produce is characteristically one of calmness and contemplation, but in spite of their tranquillity, they cost Rothko enormous emotional effort: ‘I'm not an abstract artist…I'm not interested in the relationship of colour or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate these basic human emotions…The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience as I had when I painted them.’

Rothko was poor for much of his career (from 1929 to 1959 he earned at least part of his living by teaching art), but his reputation grew in the 1950s and in 1961 he was given a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, that sealed his success. In spite of his soaring fame (and the money it brought), Rothko was plagued by depression. He had a prickly temperament, drank heavily, took barbiturates to excess, was fearful and suspicious of younger artists, had two unhappy marriages, and felt he was misunderstood (he disliked having his paintings discussed in formalist terms). His early works had often been bright and vivid in colour, but from the 1950s they became increasingly sombre, typically employing blacks, browns, and maroon. He regarded his fourteen paintings for a non-denominational chapel in Houston, Texas (now known as the Rothko Chapel), 1967–9, as his masterpieces. His last paintings were a series of stark black on grey canvases that evoke his painful state of mind leading up to his suicide (he slashed his veins in his studio). His reputation stands high, but he has not been without detractors. After visiting an exhibition of his work in 1972, Keith Vaughan wrote: ‘Feeble stuff. Large decor. Boring to paint and look at. Not surprising he killed himself if that was all there was to do.’

Rothko, Mark (1903–70). Russian-born American painter, one of the outstanding figures of Abstract Expressionism and one of the creators of Colour Field Painting. He emigrated to the USA as a child in 1913. After dropping out of Yale University in 1923 he moved to New York and studied at the Art Students League under Max Weber, but he regarded himself as essentially self-taught as a painter. In the 1930s and 1940s he went through phases influenced by Expressionism and Surrealism, but from about 1947 he began to develop his distinctive mature style. Typically his paintings feature large rectangular expanses of colour arranged parallel to each other, usually in a vertical format. The edges of these shapes are softly uneven, giving them a hazy, pulsating quality, and they seem to gently hover or float over the canvas. The paintings are often very large and the effect they produce is generally one of calmness and contemplation, but in spite of their tranquillity, they cost Rothko enormous emotional effort: ‘I'm not an abstract artist…I'm not interested in the relationship of colour or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate these basic human emotions…The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience as I had when I painted them.’

Rothko was poor for much of his career (from 1929 to 1959 he earned at least part of his living by teaching art), but his reputation grew in the 1950s and in 1961 he was given a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, that sealed his success. In spite of his soaring fame (and the money it brought), Rothko was plagued by depression. He had a prickly temperament, drank heavily, took barbiturates to excess, was fearful and suspicious of younger artists, had two unhappy marriages, and felt he was misunderstood (he disliked having his paintings discussed in formalist terms). His early works had often been bright and vivid in colour, but from the 1950s they became increasingly sombre, typically employing blacks, browns, and maroon. He regarded his fourteen paintings for a non-denominational chapel in Houston, Texas (now known as the Rothko Chapel), 1967–9, as his masterpieces. His last paintings were a series of stark black on grey canvases that evoke his painful state of mind leading up to his suicide (he slashed his veins in his studio).

Mark Rothko , 1903–70, American painter, b. Russia. Rothko emigrated to the United States in 1913. He was a student of Max Weber , then came under the influence of the surrealists. In the mid-1940s Rothko experimented with abstraction, arranging intense colors in irregular shapes. Soon he became a leading exponent of a uniquely meditative and personal strain within the larger movement of abstract expressionism . His later works (e.g., No. 10, 1950; Mus. of Modern Art, New York City) frequently consist of floating rectangles of luminous color on enormous canvases that manage to simultaneously convey a deep sensuality and a profound spirituality. Rothko's images to some degree presaged some of the techniques of the later color-field painting . He collaborated with the architect Philip Johnson on the design of a chapel in Houston in the mid-1960s. Rothko committed suicide.

Bibliography: See his The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art (2004), ed. by his son, Christopher Rothko; biography by J. E. B. Breslin (1993); D. Anfam, Mark Rothko: the Works on Canvas: Catalogue Raisonné (1998); P. Selz, Mark Rothko (1972); L. Seldes, The Legacy of Mark Rothko (1978, repr. 1996); D. Ashton, About Rothko (1983, repr. 1996); A. C. Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction (1989); M. Glimcher, ed., The Art of Mark Rothko (1991); D. Waldman, Mark Rothko in New York (1994); S. Nadelman, The Rothko Chapel Paintings (1996); L. Seldes, The Legacy of Mark Rothko (1996), J. S. Weiss et al., Mark Rothko (1998); K. Ottmann, The Essential Mark Rothko (2003).

Rothko, Mark (1903–70) US painter, b. Russia. A leader of the New York school, he developed a highly individual style featuring large, rectangular areas of thinly layered, pale colours arranged parallel to each other. Towards the end of his life, Rothko introduced darker colours, notably maroon and black. Examples of this phase can be seen in his nine paintings from the late 1950s, entitled Black on Maroon and Red on Maroon.

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