Biography of Mark Rothko

Childhood

Born in Dvinsk, Russia (in what is now Latvia), Marcus Rothkovich was the fourth
child born to Jacob and Anna Rothkovich. As Russia was a hostile environment for
Zionist Jews, Jacob immigrated to the United States with his two older sons in
1910, finally sending for the rest of his family in 1913. They settled in Portland,
Oregon, though Jacob died only a few months after the family's arrival, requiring
them to earn a living in their new country though they only spoke Hebrew and
Russian. Rothko was forced to learn English and go to work when he was very
young, resulting in a lingering sense of bitterness over his lost childhood. He
graduated early from Lincoln High School, showing more interest in music than
visual art. He was awarded a scholarship to Yale University, but soon found the
environment at Yale conservative and exclusionary; he left without graduating in
1923.

Early Training
After leaving Yale, Rothko made his way to New York City, as he put it, "to bum
about and starve a bit." Over the next few years, he took odd jobs while enrolled
in Max Weber's still life and figure drawing classes at the Art Students League,
which constituted his only artistic training. Rothko's early paintings were mostly
portraits, nudes, and urban scenes. After a brief stint in the theatre on a return visit
to Portland, Rothko was chosen to participate in a 1928 group show with Lou
Harris and Milton Avery at the Opportunity Gallery. This was a coup for a young
immigrant who had dropped out of college and had only begun painting three years
earlier.

Mature Period
By the mid-1930s, the effects of the Great Depression were being felt throughout
American society, and Rothko had become concerned with the social and political
implications of mass unemployment. This encouraged him to attend meetings of
the leftist Artists' Union. Here, amongst other issues, he and many other artists
fought for a municipal gallery, which was eventually granted. Working in the Easel
Division of the Works Progress Administration, Rothko met many other artists, yet
he felt most at ease with a group that consisted mainly of other Russian Jewish
painters. This group, which included such figures as Adolph Gottlieb, Joseph
Solman and John Graham, showed together at Gallery Secession in 1934, and
became known as "The Ten". In 1936, The Ten: Whitney Dissenters showed at the
Mercury Galleries, opening just three days after the Whitney show they were
protesting.
His painting in the 1930s, influenced by Expressionism, was typified by
claustrophobic, urban scenes rendered often in acidic colors (such as Entrance to
Subway (1938)). However, in the 1940s, he began to be influenced by Surrealism,
and abandoned Expressionism for more abstract imagery which spliced human,
plant and animal forms. These he likened to archaic symbols, which he felt might
transmit the emotions locked in ancient myths. Rothko came to see mankind as
locked in a mythic struggle with his free will and nature. In 1939, he briefly stopped
painting altogether to read mythology and philosophy, finding particular resonance
in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy. He ceased to be interested in representational
likeness and became fascinated with the articulation of interior expression.

Throughout this time Rothko's personal life was shadowed by his severe
depression, and likely an undiagnosed bipolar disorder. In 1932, he married
jewelery designer Edith Sachar, but divorced her in 1945 to marry Mary Alice
Beistel, with whom he would have two children.
While Rothko tends to be grouped with Newman and Still as one of the three chief
inspirers of Color Field Painting, Rothko's works saw many abrupt and clearly
defined stylistic shifts. The decisive shift came in the late 1940s, when he began
creating the prototypes for his best-known works. They have since come to be
called his "multi-forms": figures are banished entirely, and the compositions are
dominated by multiple soft-edged blocks of colors which seem to float in space.
Rothko wanted to remove all obstacles between the painter, the painting and the
viewer. The method he settled on used shimmering color to swamp the viewer's
visual field. His paintings were meant to entirely envelope the viewer and raise the
viewer up and out of the mechanized, commercial society over which artists like
Rothko despaired. In 1949, Rothko radically reduced the number of forms in his
pictures, and grew them such that they filled out the canvas, hovering on fields of
stained color that are only visible at their borders. These, his best known works,
have come to be called his "sectionals", and Rothko felt they better met his desire
to create universal symbols of human yearning. His paintings were not self-
expressions, he claimed, but statements about the condition of man.
Rothko would continue to work on the "sectionals" until the end of his life. They are
considered to be rather enigmatic, as they are formally at odds with their intent.
Rothko himself stated that his style changes were motivated by the growing
clarification of his content. The all-over compositions, the blurred boundaries, the
continuousness of color, and the wholeness of form were all elements of his
development towards a transcendental experience of the sublime, Rothko's goal.
"The progression of a painter's work, as it travels in time from point to point, will be
toward clarity," he stated, "toward the elimination of all obstacles between the
painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer."

Rothko garnered many honors in the course of his career, including being invited to
be one of the U.S. representatives at the Venice Biennale in 1958. Yet acclaim
never seemed to sooth Rothko's embattled spirit, and he came to be known as an
abrasive and combative character. When he was given an award by the
Guggenheim Foundation, he refused it as a protest against the idea that art should
be competitive. He was always confident and forthright in his beliefs: "I am not an
Abstractionist," he once said. He distanced himself from the classification of his
work as "non-objective color-filled painting." Instead he stressed that his paintings
were based on human emotions of "tragedy, ecstasy, doom." He claimed that art
was not about the perception of formal relationships, but was understandable in
terms of human life. He also denied being a colorist - despite the fact that color
was of primary importance to his paintings.

Rothko often stood up for his beliefs, even if it cost him dearly. In what was surely
a self-defeating act of retaliation, he refused a 1953 offer by the Whitney to
purchase two of his paintings because of, "a deep sense of responsibility for the life
my pictures will lead out in the world." Another pivotal project which would end
unhappily was the series of murals he completed for the Seagram Building in 1958.
Initially, the idea of incorporating his work within an architectural environment
appealed to him, since he had great admiration for the chapels of Michelangelo
and Vasari. He spent two years making three series of paintings for this building,
but was not pleased with the first two sets; then he became dissatisfied with the
idea that his paintings were to be hung in the opulent Four Seasons restaurant.
Characteristically, Rothko's social ideals led him to quit the commission, as he
could not reconcile his personal vision or his integrity as an artist with the
ostentatious environment.
Late Period

In 1964, Rothko received a large commission from major Houston art collectors
and philanthropists, John and Dominique de Menil. He was to create large wall
murals for a non-denominational chapel they were sponsoring on the campus of St.
Thomas Catholic University where Dominique was the head of the Art Department.
He generated fourteen paintings while working closely with a series of architects to
construct a meditative environment with a dark palette. The Rothko Chapel has
since been the setting for international meetings of some of the world's great
religious leaders, like the Dalai Lama.

In 1968, Rothko suffered an aortic aneurysm and spent three weeks in a hospital.
This brush with death would shadow him for the rest of his life. He became
resentful that his work was not being paid the proper respect and reverence he felt
it deserved. He also began to worry that his art would have no major legacy, and
this led him to work on his last major series, Black on Grays , which included
twenty-five canvases and marked a clear deviation from his previous work.
However, work failed to buoy up his spirits, and at the age of 66, Rothko committed
suicide by taking an overdose of anti-depressants and slashing his arms with a
razor blade. On the morning of February 25, 1970, his assistant, Oliver
Steindecker, arrived at the East 69th Street studio to find him on the floor of the
bathroom, covered in blood. Many of his friends were not entirely surprised that he
took his own life, saying that he had lost his passion and inspiration. Some
suggested that like others who had died before of an internal struggle, such as
Arshile Gorky, Rothko had submitted to the tortured artist's ritual of self-
annihilation.
In the aftermath of his death, three of his best friends were appointed trustees of
his estate, and they secretly transferred control of some eight-hundred paintings to
the Marlborough Gallery, which had been representing Rothko for several years, at
a fraction of their market value. Rothko's daughter, Kate, took the men and the
gallery to court in what became a notoriously messy and protracted dispute. During
the lengthy court battle, the sometimes illegal and unethical dealings of the art
world were publicly exposed for the first time. Time critic Robert Hughes cited the
"Rothko case" as what essentially brought about what he called the "death of
Abstract Expressionism". Ultimately, the Rothko children won the case and
received half of the estate. The Rothko Foundation then donated the rest of the
works to museums in the United States and abroad.
The Legacy of Mark Rothko

Painting consumed Rothko's life, and although he did not receive the attention he
felt his work deserved in his own lifetime, his fame has increased dramatically in
the years following his death. At odds with the more formally rigorous artists among
the Abstract Expressionists, Rothko nevertheless explored the compositional
potential of color and form on the human psyche. To stand in front of a Rothko is to
be in the presence of the pulsing vibrancy of his enormous canvases; it is to feel, if
only momentarily, something of the sublime spirituality he relentlessly sought to
evoke. Rigidly uncompromising, Rothko refused to bend to the more distasteful
aspects of the art world, a position upheld by his children who did nothing less than
alter the entire state of the art market in their fierce protection of his life and work.

Writings and Ideas

Introduction

Nietzsche, myth, and Jewish and social revolutionary thought were all important
influences on Rothko's life and art. He once wrote to The New York Times saying
he would not defend his pictures, "because they defend themselves." Yet he was
always a vocal advocate for artists, writing many reviews as well as essays on the
complexities of the art world. Around 1941, probably during his yearlong hiatus
from painting, Rothko wrote the manuscript for a book which was to be called The
Artist's Reality. However, it was never published in his lifetime, being hidden away
in a manila folder labeled "miscellaneous papers" for over fifty years. It was
discovered by his children in a warehouse and has since been edited by his son,
Christopher, and was published by Yale University Press in 2006. These writings
discuss Rothko's ideas about Modern art, myth, beauty, the nature of American art,
and the challenges of being an artist in his society. The book is most unique in that
it never references Rothko's own work, but speaks from the point of view of the
artist in general. While his political leanings were clearly Leftist, he maintained a
highly subjective approach to theory.

On Being an Artist

In The Artist's Reality, Rothko described the perception of artists in society and
how they have fostered myths of creativity into reality based on their own personal
fantasy lives. He discussed the ways in which authority in its various forms had
made the rules that artists must live by and that the market was the latest dictator
of these rules. At the time of this writing, WWII was beginning in Europe and
anxieties over conformity and tyranny gave Rothko's writing a constant sense of
disquiet.

On Freedom
Above all, Rothko championed the freedom of the artist. The politics and poetics of
Rothko's life were inseparable and his art constitutes the strongest evidence of
this. As he declared in the year of his suicide, "I am still an anarchist!" Critic Dore
Ashton wrote that Rothko did not sit easily with the world, that he was always
searching for an escape. Viewed in the light of his suicide, many have read his
paintings as windows through which Rothko sought to transcend a world in which
he could not find comfort.

On Interpretation of his Work

Throughout his writings, Rothko insisted that his work was meant to be viewed
closely and intimately, not observed from a safe, sterile distance. For those who
find Rothko's paintings overwhelming, it is perhaps comforting to know that he
intended to communicate with his audience, not to intimidate. "I realize that
historically the function of painting large pictures is something very grandiose and
pompous," he wrote in 1951. "The reason I paint them however. . . is precisely
because I want to be intimate and human."

On Critics

Most critics interpreted Rothko's work in formalist terms, in direct opposition to the
intention of the artist to convey grand spiritual drama. Consequently, perhaps, he
had little patience for most professional writers on his work, saying, "I hate and
distrust all art historians, experts and critics. They are all parasites, feeding on the
body of art. Their work is not only useless but misleading. They can say nothing
worth listening to about art or the artist."

Greenberg on Rothko
Clement Greenberg wrote little about Rothko's work. They met in 1943, and
Greenberg was not greatly impressed by him. "We talked," Greenberg recalled,
"and I found Rothko sympathetic, but I also found him very square. Later he got
pompous. But he always stayed a little square."
Greenberg's formalism encouraged him to talk of Rothko's work in terms of "the
rectilinear," "dividing lines," and, above all, "color" (see his essay "'American-Type'
Painting" (1955)).

Rosenberg on Rothko
Harold Rosenberg, whose criticism had been shaped more by Existentialism than
Greenberg's formalism, was in rare agreement with his rival concerning Rothko.
Writing in March 1978 in his column "The Art World," for the New Yorker,
Rosenberg said, "Rothko had reduced painting to volume, tone, and color, with
color as the vital element." The "three or four horizontal blocks of color" that Rothko
sustained for twenty years comprised, he wrote, "the substance of his emotional
life.. the exhilarated tragic experience.. the only source book of art."

Porter on Rothko
In his letter to the Parisian Review in 1955, artist and critic Fairfield
Porter responded to Greenberg's assessment of Rothko in "'American-Type'
Painting." Greenberg had asserted that Rothko's "opposition of pure color" was
reminiscent of Matisse, but Porter disagreed, noting that Rothko's work was not as
balanced as Matisse's in terms of proportion and composition, and that his use of
symbolic color was not as sensitive.

Letter to the Editor by Rothko and Gottlieb

There are several drafts of this letter to the editor, published June 13, 1943, in
which Rothko and Gottlieb respond to the Times art review by Edward Alden
Jewell of their work at an exhibition at the Federation of Modern Painters and
Sculptors. Significantly, in drafts five and six, they list their beliefs about modern
art: "We believe our pictures demonstrate our aesthetic beliefs.. to us, art is an
adventure into a world unknown, which can only be explored by those willing to
take risks.. this world is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.. it is
our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way- not his way..
We favor the simple expression of complex thought.. We are for flat forms because
they destroy illusion and reveal truth.. it is a widely accepted notion among painters
that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted.. There is no
such thing as a good painting about nothing. We assert that subject is crucial and
only that subject matter is valid if it is tragic and timeless."
Rothko and Gottlieb in Conversation

In 1943, Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb took part in a radio broadcast in which they
answered questions put to them in a letter; their responses covered their ideas
about portraiture, mythology, abstraction, and subject matter. During the
discussion, Rothko also talked about his belief in a collective psychology, based in
antiquity and mythology. Myths explored the fundamentals of human experience,
he believed, "If [the] titles [of my paintings] recall the known myths of antiquity.. [I]
have used them because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall
back to express basic psychological ideas. They are the symbols of man's primitive
fears and motivations, no matter in which land or what time, changing only in detail
but never in substance.. and modern psychology finds them persisting still in our
dreams, our vernacular, and our art, for all the changes in the outward conditions
of life."