Mark Rothko

Fine Artist

  • Born: September 25, 1903
  • Birthplace: Dvinsk, Russian Empire (now Daugavpils, Latvia)
  • Died: February 25, 1970
  • Place of death: New York, New York

Latvian-born American artist

Rothko stripped art to its essence by focusing on the elements of which a work of art is comprised and on the emotional and spiritual reactions the works elicit. The Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, which he helped to design, is a monument to his style and substance as an artist and as a designer of architectural spaces.

Area of achievement Art

Early Life

Mark Rothko (RAWTH-koh) was born Marcus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, part of the Russian Empire, to Jacob and Anna Goldin Rothkowitz. His father was a pharmacist who stressed the importance of education, and he provided a secular and political upbringing for his five children. The Rothkowitz family was Jewish, and had converted to Orthodox Judaism after the Russian pogrom following the 1905 revolution, when Jews were blamed for the hardships that befell Russia. Rothko spent his childhood in fear, witnessing violence and bigotry perpetrated by the Cossacks.

Fearing they would be drafted into the czarist army, Jacob took his oldest sons to the United States and settled in Portland, Oregon, where his brothers established a clothing manufacturing business. Rothko remained in Latvia with his older sister and mother, joining his father in 1913. The following year Jacob died, leaving Anna to raise the children in a strange land. Rothko and his siblings took odd jobs to support the family, and his mother took in boarders.

Rothko excelled in public school, jumping from the third to the fifth grade, and graduated from high school with honors in 1921. He attended Yale University on a full academic scholarship, planning to become either an engineer or a lawyer. However, his scholarship ended after his freshman year, forcing Rothko to take odd jobs to support his education. Unhappy with bourgeois Ivy League society and unable to afford his education, Rothko left Yale in 1923 and relocated to New York City, where he enrolled in the New School of Design and studied with Arshile Gorky. He continued his education at the Art Students League with still-life artist Max Weber, who instilled in his students an appreciation for the religious and emotional import of art.

Life’s Work

During the 1930’s, Rothko became involved with a group of experimental New York artists that included Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Barnett Newman, and Clifford Still, who claimed to represent the logical side of American abstract expressionism. These artists employed mythological figures, or their presences, to engage and enlighten the viewer. Eventually, figures lost importance to the emotional connection they evoked. Rothko, who was heavily inspired by Greek mythology and with the writings of Carl Jung and Friedrich Nietzsche, became engrossed in mythological and primitive paintings. He came to believe that these paintings stripped art down to its core and emphasized the spiritual and emotional aspects of human life and the human relationship to the universe, all the while awakening primitive desires and instincts.

In 1937, Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Joseph Sloman established the Artists Union, a municipal art gallery in which artists could organize and promote their work. During that year, Rothko separated from his wife, Edith Sachar, and became a U.S. citizen over growing fears of Nazism in Europe. By 1939, Rothko became a member of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors, who were committed to keeping art free from political propaganda. As World War II ravaged Europe, many Surrealist artists sought refuge in New York. Influenced by the Surrealists, including Max Ernst, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí, Rothko began incorporating ethereal, ghostly images into his works, merging Surrealism and abstraction.

Rothko’s worked evolved into abstraction, as it was weighted by symbolism. He abandoned identifiable central figures and incorporated floating forms in his work by the 1940’s. His 1946 piece, Vessels of Magic, features free form biomorphic shapes floating in the foreground of a color field seascape, heavily influenced by a similar work by Ernst.

In 1948, Rothko, along with Motherwell, Baziotes, and David Hare, began an informal art school called the Subjects of the Artist. During this time Rothko believed reliance upon any specific object detracted from the universal “spirit of myth,” which he believed was the core of art. His work reflected this as he turned his focus to color, texture, and size, which would evolve into his signature multiform and color field paintings.

Rothko, along with Newman and Still, became the frontrunners among the color field movement, with Rothko arguably the most prominent. His works could be classified as landscape pieces, whose color blocks created horizons against sea or land. He worked with oil paint on large canvases, believing that large paintings were all-encompassing and that they invited the viewer inside the work. On these large canvases, Rothko would apply layer upon layer of rich oranges and blues in rectangular shapes, parallel to one another, created by quick and light, yet powerful brush strokes. The movement’s focus shifted from subject matter to the movement and tension between the colors, sizes, and textures of the simple yet varied shapes. Rothko abandoned traditional naming structures as well, naming his paintings by a number series or color descriptor in order not to detract from the work’s essence. Multiple layers of paint created a depth, as if looking into a pool of water, and offered meditative qualities. The lack of subject or figure allowed the viewer to ponder the abstract notions of art, and their own relationship to those abstractions, which often led to a spiritual experience.

Rothko soon developed a name for himself as well as a lucrative career, yet as he became more successful, his paintings became darker. Many suggested the dark paint reflected the darkness he was experiencing while suffering from depression. His color schemes changed from orange and blue hues to deep reds, maroons, and near blacks.

During this period Rothko received two major commissions, neither of which he would see to completion. In 1958, Seagram and Sons asked Rothko to design paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant in the company’s Park Avenue skyscraper, the Seagram Building, in Manhattan. Rothko enthusiastically accepted the job and began creating the forty commissioned paintings. As his paintings and mood became darker, Rothko obsessed over how his paintings were displayed. He frequently demanded control over how the rooms were to be lighted. He would end up terminating his contract with Seagram and returning his advance, stating the pretentious atmosphere was an inappropriate setting for his work. The collection of paintings was divided between three museums: London’s Tate Gallery, Japan’s Kawamura Memorial Museum, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Despite the canceled Four Seasons commission, Rothko accepted another commission, which would turn out to be his signature project. Philanthropists Dominique and John de Menil of Houston, Texas, wished to create a chapel for people of all faiths and beliefs, so they offered Rothko a commission that also gave him complete control over the design of the chapel’s interior, an offer Rothko had been seeking his entire career. The meditative and universal spiritual qualities of Rothko’s work attracted the de Menils. Rothko soon accepted the commission.

Rothko would spend six years of his life (1964-1970) not only creating the fourteen large paintings but also working with the architects on designing the layout of the chapel’s space and its lighting. The chapel paintings were devoid of anything identifiable. They consisted of an emptiness designed to be completed by those in the chapel during meditation and in the process of working toward enlightenment. Complementing the chapel, and Rothko’s work, is the Broken Obelisk, a sculptural piece made by Newman that sits outside the building in a reflecting pool.

Rothko would not live to see the completion of the Rothko Chapel, which opened February 28, 1971. An assistant found Rothko’s bloodied body in his New York kitchen. Rothko had killed himself by slitting his wrists one year before the chapel opened.

Significance

Rothko left the emotional reaction of the viewers of his art to supply the work’s subject matter. During a period in the New York art scene where images were being replicated multiple times by commercial methods and ordinary objects were elevated to the super extraordinary, Rothko’s work appeared humble and refreshing. Unlike the 1960’s pop artist Andy Warhol, for instance, Rothko’s work was not obsessed with consumerism or society. Instead, his work focused on the individual’s emotional and frequently spiritual relationship to art and to the viewer’s surroundings.

Rothko’s work simultaneously inspired and juxtaposed raw emotion, conjuring feelings of being overwhelmed, depressed, or anxious with an inescapable feeling of calmness, serenity, and comfort. His gift of abstracting the pure essence of his medium and of art itself inspired many contemporary, and future, abstract expressionists. In addition to his work as an artist, Rothko’s paintings themselves have broken earnings records at auction, and his works have been displayed in retrospectives across the world.

Bibliography

Breslin, James E. B. Mark Rothko: A Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Breslin offers a thorough look into Rothko’s life, exposing his demons to gain a deeper understanding of the artist.

Chave, Anna C. Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001. Chave provides an overview of modern art in general, while highlighting Rothko’s contribution to the field.

Ottmann, Klaus. The Essential Mark Rothko. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2006. An examination of the emotional power of Rothko’s work, and a look into his intense anxiety and depression.

Rothko, Mark. Writings on Art. Edited by Miguel Lopez-Remiro. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006. A collection of Rothko’s writings on art and art theory. Also includes general correspondence between Rothko and others.

Rothko, Mark, Kate Prizel Rothko, and Christopher Rothko. The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006. This manuscript, written by the artist, was found after Rothko’s death. It is believed to have been written in the 1940’s and is a manifesto about art and its social, meditative, and communicative powers.

Souter, Janet, and Gerry Souter. Mark Rothko. London: Parkstone Press, 2007. A recognition of Rothko’s timeless impact on modern art, and an exploration of the artist and his inspiration.

Walther, Ingo F., ed. Art of the Twentieth Century. New York: Taschen, 2000. A comprehensive look into twentieth century art. This two-volume set provides hundreds of color photographs and biographies of the great artists of the twentieth century.

Weiss, Jeffery. Mark Rothko. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2001. Weiss’s oversized monograph contains more than one hundred color photographs of Rothko’s work and provides an overview of the artist and his work.

1901-1940: 1917: De Stijl Advocates Mondrian’s Neoplasticism.

1941-1970: October 20, 1942: Peggy Guggenheim’s Gallery Promotes New American Art; December, 1952: Rosenberg Defines “Action Painting”; 1960’s: SoHo Emerges as a Center for Contemporary Art.