Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko was born Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz on September 25, 1903, in Dvinsk, a city in the Russian Empire that is now Daugavpils, Latvia ^[1]. He was the youngest of four children of Jacob Rothkowitz, a pharmacist, and Anna Goldin Rothkowitz. The family was Jewish, and the elder Rothkowitz, alarmed by pogroms and by the prospect of his sons being conscripted into the tsarist army, decided to emigrate. Jacob left for the United States in 1910, and Markus followed with his mother and sister in 1913, joining relatives in Portland, Oregon ^[1][2].

The move was quickly shadowed by loss. Jacob Rothkowitz died within months of his youngest son's arrival, and the family scraped by on modest work while Markus sold newspapers and helped in a relative's clothing business. Despite arriving with no English, he moved rapidly through Portland's public schools, graduating from Lincoln High School in 1921 with strong enough marks to win a scholarship to Yale University ^[2].

At Yale he studied a general liberal arts curriculum rather than art, but he found the atmosphere of the campus snobbish and unwelcoming to Jewish students from immigrant families. He co-founded a short-lived satirical sheet criticizing the university's social conventions, and in 1923 he left without a degree and moved to New York City ^[1][3]. Yale eventually awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1969, a year before his death ^[3].

New York gave the young Rothkowitz his direction. He later said he stumbled into art after visiting a class at the Art Students League, where he studied intermittently in the mid 1920s, most significantly under the painter Max Weber, who introduced him to modernist ideas filtered through European art ^[1][2]. To support himself he took jobs including part-time teaching. From 1929 he taught children's art classes at the Center Academy of the Brooklyn Jewish Center, a post he kept for more than two decades and which shaped his belief that authentic expression mattered more than technical polish ^[2].

His first professional footholds came in the 1930s. He exhibited with a group of young painters at the Opportunity Gallery, had early shows in Portland and New York, and in 1935 helped found The Ten, a group of expressionist-leaning artists, many of them Jewish, who protested what they saw as the conservative taste of American museums ^[1][4]. During the Depression he worked in the easel division of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, painting urban scenes, subway interiors, and isolated figures in muted tones ^[4].

The early 1940s brought a decisive turn. Convinced that figure painting could no longer carry serious meaning in a world at war, Rothko (he began using the shortened name around 1940 and made it legal later) turned to Greek myth, archaic symbols, and biomorphic forms influenced by Surrealism. With Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman he drafted a widely noticed 1943 letter to the New York Times declaring that subject matter was crucial and that only tragic and timeless themes were worth painting ^[1][5]. Peggy Guggenheim gave him a solo exhibition at her Art of This Century gallery in 1945, placing him among the emerging painters soon labeled the New York School ^[5].

Between 1946 and 1949 Rothko worked through a transitional series known as the multiforms, loose patches of color floating free of line and symbol. By 1949 he had distilled this into the format that made his reputation: two, three, or four soft-edged rectangles of color stacked on a vertical canvas, their edges breathing into a surrounding field ^[1][6]. He built these surfaces from many thin layers of paint, so that colors seem to glow from within and shift as the viewer stands before them. Any account of Mark Rothko achievements begins with this invention, which he insisted was not decoration or design but a vehicle for basic human emotions ^[6].

Recognition accumulated through the 1950s. He showed regularly at the Betty Parsons Gallery and then with Sidney Janis, was included in the Museum of Modern Art's influential "Fifteen Americans" exhibition in 1952, and represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1958 ^[1][5]. Critics grouped him with the color field wing of Abstract Expressionism alongside Newman and Clyfford Still, though Rothko rejected the label of abstractionist and disliked being called a colorist ^[6].

His late career centered on commissioned ensembles. In 1958 he accepted a lucrative contract to paint murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building, produced some thirty dark canvases in maroon and black, then withdrew from the commission and returned the money, reportedly unwilling to have the work hang over expensive dinners. He later gave nine of the Seagram murals to the Tate in London, where they arrived in 1970 ^[7]. He completed a mural cycle for Harvard University in 1962, and from 1964 he worked on fourteen monumental dark paintings for an octagonal chapel in Houston commissioned by John and Dominique de Menil. The Rothko Chapel opened in 1971, after his death, and has become both a pilgrimage site for viewers of his work and an interfaith gathering place ^[8].

Rothko married twice. His first marriage, to the jewelry designer Edith Sachar in 1932, ended in divorce in the mid 1940s ^[1]. In 1945 he married Mary Alice Beistle, known as Mell, an illustrator with whom he had two children, Kate, born in 1950, and Christopher, born in 1963 ^[1][3]. He became a United States citizen in 1938, prompted in part by fears about the treatment of Jews in Europe ^[2].

Friends described a man of intense conviction and considerable anxiety, widely read in philosophy and devoted to Nietzsche, Aeschylus, and Mozart. He wrote seriously about art, and a book-length manuscript from around 1940 to 1941 was published posthumously by his son as The Artist's Reality ^[3]. He was famously protective of how his paintings were shown, demanding low light, close hanging, and quiet rooms, and he could be scornful of collectors he suspected of buying his work as fashion ^[6].

Teaching remained part of his life long after he needed the income. Beyond his decades at the Brooklyn Jewish Center's academy, he taught at Brooklyn College in the early 1950s and held visiting posts on the West Coast, experiences that fed his conviction that art was a moral undertaking rather than a profession of taste ^[2][3].

Success sat uneasily on him. By the 1960s Rothko was wealthy and celebrated, with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961 that traveled to European capitals, yet he worried that his paintings were misunderstood as serene decoration when he intended them to carry tragic weight ^[1][5]. The rise of Pop Art troubled him, and he grew increasingly isolated from younger movements in New York.

His health broke in April 1968, when he suffered an aneurysm of the aorta. Doctors ordered him to stop working on large canvases, and he turned to smaller acrylics on paper and to the somber gray and black paintings that dominated his final two years ^[1][6]. He separated from Mell on New Year's Day 1969 and moved into his studio on East 69th Street. Depression, heavy drinking, and marital collapse compounded his physical decline.

On February 25, 1970, Rothko was found dead in his studio, having cut his arms and taken an overdose of barbiturates; the death was ruled a suicide. He was 66 ^[1][3]. Mell Rothko died six months later. In the years that followed, his estate became the center of a notorious legal battle: his children sued the executors and the Marlborough Gallery over the handling of nearly 800 paintings, and in 1975 a New York court found the executors liable, removed them, and imposed damages in one of the most consequential art-fraud cases in American history ^[9].

Any Mark Rothko biography has to reckon with how completely his reputation has grown since 1970. Once grouped loosely with the Abstract Expressionists, he is now treated as a singular figure whose mature paintings ask for slow, almost devotional looking. Major holdings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which received a large gift from the Mark Rothko Foundation in the 1980s, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Tate keep his work permanently before the public ^[7][10]. Retrospectives in Washington, Paris, and elsewhere continue to draw large audiences.

The market has followed. His 1961 canvas Orange, Red, Yellow sold at Christie's in 2012 for nearly 87 million dollars, at the time a record for any contemporary artwork at auction ^[9]. Yet for those asking who was Mark Rothko beyond the price tags, the more durable answer lies in the Rothko Chapel, in the hushed Seagram mural room in London, and in his insistence that a painted rectangle of color could hold grief and transcendence at once ^[7][8].

Among the enduring Mark Rothko facts is the sheer scale of what he left: roughly eight hundred paintings on canvas and many more works on paper, a published treatise on art, and two children who have devoted much of their lives to studying and stewarding the work. His influence runs through color field painting, minimalist installation, and the modern museum's habit of giving a single artist a contemplative room of their own ^[3][10].