Mark Rothko (Russian МаркРо́тко; born Ма́ркусЯ́ковлевичРотко́вич; Marcus YakovlevichRothkowitz; September 25, 1903 – February 25, 1970) was an American painter of Latvian Jewish descent. He is generally identified as an Abstract Expressionist, although he himself rejected this label and even resisted classification as an abstract painter. With Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, he is one of the most famous postwar American artists.

Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Vitebsk Province, in the Russian Empire. His father, Jacob (Yakov) Rothkowitz, was a pharmacist and an intellectual who initially provided his children with a secular and political, rather than religious, upbringing. In an environment where Jews were often blamed for many of the evils that befell Russia, Rothko's early childhood was plagued by fear.[1]

Despite Jacob Rothkowitz's modest income, the family was highly educated (We were a reading family, Rothko's sister recalled[2]), and Rothko was able to speak Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew. Following his father's return to the Orthodox Judaism of his own youth, Rothko, the youngest of four siblings, was sent to the cheder at the age of five, where he studied the Talmud, although his elder siblings had been educated in the public school system.[3]

Emigration from Russia to the U.S.
Fearing that his sons were about to be drafted into the Imperial Russian Army, Jacob Rothkowitz emigrated from Russia to the United States. Marcus remained in Russia with his mother and elder sister Sonia. They joined Jacob and the elder brothers in Portland, Oregon later, arriving at Ellis Island in the winter of 1913. Jacob's death a few months later left the family without economic support. Sonia operated a cash register, while Marcus worked in one of his uncle's warehouses, selling newspapers to employees.[4]

Marcus started school in the United States in 1913, quickly accelerating from third to fifth grade, and completed the secondary level with honors at Lincoln High School in Portland, in June 1921 at the age of seventeen. He learned his fourth language, English, and became an active member of the Jewish community center, where he proved adept at political discussions. Like his father, Rothko was passionate about such issues as workers’ rights and women's right to contraception. He heard activist Emma Goldman speak on one of her West Coast lecture tours.[5]

Rothko received a scholarship to Yale. At the end of his freshman year, the scholarship was not renewed, and he worked as a waiter and delivery boy to support his studies. He found the Yale community to be elitist and racist. Rothko and a friend, Aaron Director, started a satirical magazine The Yale Saturday Evening Pest, which lampooned the school's stuffy, bourgeois tone.[6] In any event, Rothko's nature was always more that of the self-taught man than the diligent pupil. One of his fellow students remembers that he hardly seemed to study, but that he was a voracious reader.[7] At the end of his sophomore year, Rothko dropped out and did not return until he was awarded an honorary degree forty-six years later.[8]

Early career
In the autumn of 1923, Rothko found work in New York's garment district. While visiting a friend at the Art Students League of New York, he saw students sketching a model. According to Rothko, this was the beginning of his life as an artist. He later enrolled in the New York School of Design, where one of his instructors was the artist and class monitor Arshile Gorky. This was probably his first encounter with a member of the American avant-garde, though the two men never became close, given Gorky's dominating nature. (Rothko referred to Gorky's leadership in the class as overcharged with supervision.[9]) That autumn, he took courses at the Art Students League taught by the Cubist artist Max Weber, a fellow Russian Jew. To his students eager to know about Modernism, Weber, who had been a part of the French avant-garde, was seen as a living repository of modern art history.[10] Under Weber's tutelage, Rothko began to view art as a tool of emotional and religious expression, and Rothko's paintings from this era reveal the influence of his instructor.[11] (Years later, when Weber attended a show of his former student's work and expressed his admiration, Rothko was immensely pleased.[12])

Rothko's circle
Rothko's move to New York established him in a fertile artistic atmosphere. Modernist painters were having more shows in New York galleries all the time, and the city's museums were an invaluable resource to foster a budding artist's knowledge and skills. Among the important early influences on Rothko were the works of the German Expressionists, the surrealist art of Paul Klee, and the paintings of Georges Rouault. In 1928, Rothko exhibited works with a group of other young artists at the appropriately named Opportunity Gallery.[13] His paintings included dark, moody, expressionist interiors, as well as urban scenes, and were generally well accepted among critics and peers. Despite modest success, Rothko still needed to supplement his income, and in 1929 he began giving classes in painting and clay sculpture at the Center Academy, where he remained as teacher until 1952. During this time, he met Adolph Gottlieb, who, along with Barnett Newman, Joseph Solman, Louis Schanker, and John Graham, was part of a group of young artists surrounding the painter Milton Avery, fifteen years Rothko's senior. According to Elaine de Kooning, it was Avery who gave Rothko the idea that [the life of a professional artist] was a possibility.[14] Avery's stylized nature paintings, utilizing a rich knowledge of form and color, would be a tremendous influence on Rothko.[13] Soon, Rothko's paintings took on subject matter and color similar to Avery's, as seen in Bathers, or Beach Scene of 1933-1934.[15]

Rothko, Gottlieb, Newman, Solman, Graham, and their mentor, Avery, spent considerable time together, vacationing at Lake George and Gloucester, Massachusetts, spending their day painting and their evenings discussing art. During a 1932 visit to Lake George, Rothko met Edith Sachar, a jewelry designer, whom he married that fall.[16] The following summer, his first one-man show was held at the Portland Art Museum, consisting mostly of drawings and aquarelles; for this exhibition, Rothko took the very unusual step of displaying work done by his pre-adolescent students from the Center Academy alongside his own.[17] His family was unable to understand Rothko's decision to be an artist, especially considering the dire economic situation of the Depression.[18] Having suffered serious financial setbacks, the Rothkowitzes were mystified by Rothko's seeming indifference to financial necessity; they felt he was doing his mother a disservice by not finding a more lucrative and realistic career.[19]

First one-man show in New York
Returning to New York, Rothko had his first East Coast one-man show at the Contemporary Arts Gallery.[20] He showed fifteen oil paintings, mostly portraits, along with some aquarelles and drawings. It was the oils that would capture the critics' eye; Rothko's use of rich fields of colors moved beyond Avery's influence. In late 1935, Rothko joined with IlyaBolotowsky, Ben-Zion, Adolph Gottlieb, Lou Harris, Ralph Rosenborg, Louis Schanker and Joseph Solman to form The Ten (Whitney Ten Dissenters), whose mission (according to a catalog from a 1937 Mercury Gallery show) was to protest against the reputed equivalence of American painting and literal painting.[21] Rothko's style was already evolving in the direction of his renowned later works, yet, despite this newfound exploration of color, Rothko turned his attention to another formal and stylistic innovation, inaugurating a period of surrealist paintings influenced by mythological fables and symbols.

Rothko was earning a growing reputation among his peers, particularly among the group that formed the Artists' Union.[22] Begun in 1937, and including Gottlieb and Soloman, the Artists' Union hoped to create a municipal art gallery to show self-organized group exhibitions. In 1936, the group showed at the Galerie Bonaparte in France, which resulted in some positive critical notices. (Rothko's paintings, one reviewer remarked, display authentic coloristic values.[23]) Then, in 1938, a show was held at the Mercury Gallery in New York, intended as a protest against the Whitney Museum of American Art, which the group regarded as having a provincial, regionalist agenda. It was also during this period that Rothko, like Avery, Gorky, Pollock, de Kooning, and so many others, found employment with the Works Progress Administration.[24]

Development of style
In 1936, Rothko began writing a book, never completed, about similarities in the art of children and the work of modern painters.

According to Rothko, the work of modernists, influenced by primitive art, could be compared to that of children in that child art transforms itself into primitivism, which is only the child producing a mimicry of himself. In this manuscript, he observed that the fact that one usually begins with drawing is already academic. We start with color. Rothko was using fields of color in his aquarelles and city scenes.

Rothko's work matured from representation and mythological subjects into rectangular fields of color and light, that later culminated in his final works for the Rothko Chapel. However, between the primitivist and playful urban scenes and aquarelles of the early period, and the late, transcendent fields of color, was a long period of transition, marked by two important events in Rothko's life the onset of World War II and his reading of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Maturity
Rothko separated from Edith in the summer of 1937. They reconciled several months later, yet their relationship remained tense.[26] On February 21, 1938, Rothko finally became a citizen of the United States, prompted by fears that the growing Nazi influence in Europe might provoke sudden deportation of American Jews. Concerned about anti-Semitism in America and Europe, Rothko in 1940 abbreviated his name from Marcus Rothkowitz to Mark Rothko. The name Roth, a common abbreviation, was still identifiably Jewish, so he settled upon Rothko.[27]

Inspiration from mythology
Fearing that modern American painting had reached a conceptual dead end, Rothko was intent upon exploring subjects other than urban and nature scenes. He sought subjects that would complement his growing concern with form, space, and color. The world crisis of war lent this search an immediacy because he insisted that the new subject matter have a social impact, yet be able to transcend the confines of current political symbols and values. In his essay, The Romantics Were Prompted, published in 1949, Rothko argued that the archaic artist ... found it necessary to create a group of intermediaries, monsters, hybrids, gods and demigods in much the same way that modern man found intermediaries in Fascism and the Communist Party. For Rothko, without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama.[28]

Rothko's use of mythology as a commentary on current history was not novel. Rothko, Gottlieb, and Newman read and discussed the works of Freud and Jung, in particular their theories concerning dreams and the archetypes of the collective unconscious, and they understood mythological symbols as images that operate in a space of human consciousness that transcends specific history and culture.[29] Rothko later said his artistic approach was reformed by his study of the dramatic themes of myth. He allegedly stopped painting altogether in 1940 to immerse himself in Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough and Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams.[30]

Nietzsche's influence
Rothko's new vision would attempt to address modern man's spiritual and creative mythological requirements. The most crucial philosophical influence on Rothko in this period was Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy.[31] Nietzsche claimed that Greek tragedy served to redeem man from the terrors of mortal life. The exploration of novel topics in modern art ceased to be Rothko's goal.

From this time on, his art had the goal of relieving modern man's spiritual emptiness. He believed that this emptiness resulted partly from lack of a mythology, which, according to Nietzsche, could address the growth of a child's mind and – to a mature man his life and struggles.[citation needed][page needed] Rothko believed his art could free unconscious energies previously liberated by mythological images, symbols, and rituals. He considered himself a mythmaker and proclaimed that the exhilarated tragic experience is for me the only source of art.

Many of his paintings in this period contrast barbaric scenes of violence with civilized passivity, using imagery drawn primarily from Aeschylus's Oresteia trilogy. In his 1942 painting The Omen of the Eagle, the archetypal images of man, bird, beast and tree ... merge into a single tragic idea.[citation needed][page needed] A list of Rothko's paintings from this period illustrate his use of myth Antigone, Oedipus, The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Leda, The Furies, Altar of Orpheus. Rothko evokes Judeo-Christian imagery in Gethsemane, The Last Supper, and Rites of Lilith. He also invokes Egyptian (Room in Karnak) and Syrian (The Syrian Bull) myth. Soon after the World War II, Rothko believed his titles limited the larger, transcendent aims of his paintings, so he stopped titling his paintings.

Mythomorphic abstractionism
At the root of Rothko and Gottlieb's presentation of archaic forms and symbols as subject matter illuminating modern existence had been the influence of Surrealism, Cubism, and abstract art. In 1936, Rothko attended two exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Cubism and Abstract Art, and Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism.[32] Both experiences greatly influenced his celebrated 1938 Subway Scene.

In 1942, following the success of shows by Ernst, Miró, Tanguy, and Salvador Dalí, who had immigrated to the United States because of the war, Surrealism took New York by storm.[33] Rothko and his peers, Gottlieb and Newman, met and discussed the art and ideas of these European pioneers as well as those of Mondrian. They began to regard themselves as heirs to the European avant-garde.

With mythic form as a catalyst, they would merge the two European styles of Surrealism and abstraction. As a result, Rothko’s work became increasingly abstract; perhaps ironically, Rothko himself described the process as being one toward clarity.

New paintings were unveiled at a 1942 show at Macy's department store in New York City. In response to a negative review by the New York Times, Rothko and Gottlieb issued a manifesto (written mainly by Rothko) which stated, in response to the Times critic's self-professed befuddlement over the new work, We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth. On a more strident note, they took a potshot at those who wanted to live surrounded by less challenging art, noting that their work necessarily must insult anyone who is spiritually attuned to interior decoration.[34]

Rothko's vision of myth as a replenishing resource for an era of spiritual void had been set in motion decades before, by his reading of Carl Jung, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Thomas Mann, among others.[35] Unlike his predecessors, Rothko would, in his later period, develop his philosophy of the tragic ideal into the realm of pure abstraction.

Break with Surrealism
On June 13, 1943, Rothko and Sachar separated again.[36] Rothko suffered a long depression following their divorce. Thinking that a change of scenery might help, Rothko returned to Portland. From there he traveled to Berkeley, where he met artist Clyfford Still, and the two began a close friendship.[37] Still's deeply abstract paintings would be of considerable influence on Rothko's later works. In the autumn of 1943, Rothko returned to New York, where he met noted collector and art dealer Peggy Guggenheim, who was initially reluctant to take on his work.[38] Rothko’s one-man show at Guggenheim's The Art of This Century Gallery in late 1945 resulted in few sales (prices ranging from $150 to $750) and in less-than-favorable reviews. During this period, Rothko had been stimulated by Still's abstract landscapes of color, and his style shifted away from surrealism. Rothko's experiments in interpreting the unconscious symbolism of everyday forms had run their course.

His future lay with abstraction
“I insist upon the equal existence of the world engendered in the mind and the world engendered by God outside of it. If I have faltered in the use of familiar objects, it is because I refuse to mutilate their appearance for the sake of an action which they are too old to serve, or for which perhaps they had never been intended. I quarrel with surrealists and abstract art only as one quarrels with his father and mother; recognizing the inevitability and function of my roots, but insistent upon my dissent; I, being both they, and an integral completely independent of them.