Mark Rothko (real name – Marcus Rothkowitz) was born on September 25, 1903, in the Russian Empire in the town of Dvinsk, Vitebsk Governorate (today – Daugavpils, Latvia). In his family, they spoke Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew. The Rothkowitz family lived on the widest street in the city (Shosseynaya, 17) in a spacious three-story house that has survived to this day, where there were already three children.

Mark’s father, Yakov (full name Yankel-Bendet Ioselevich) Rothkowitz, worked as a pharmacist and held political meetings in his free time; his mother, Khaya Mordukhovna Rothkowitz (Goldina), was a housewife. At the age of five, his parents sent the boy to study at a cheder – a religious primary school. Being the youngest child, Marcus was the first to receive a religious education; his older brothers studied in ordinary secular institutions. “My father was an activist of the Jewish Social Democratic Party, the Bund,” Marcus later recalled, “he deeply believed in Marxism and opposed religion partly because in Dvinsk orthodox Jews were the majority and dictated their will.” However, after the suppression of the 1905 revolution, his father became a Zionist and turned to faith, which prompted him to send his son to cheder. There, the schoolboy studied the Pentateuch and ancient Hebrew. Later, this would be reflected in his avant-garde work. However, he did not like attending religious school: once, coming home, he declared that he would never go to the synagogue again.

The head of the family, fearing that the children would be drafted into the Tsarist army, and following the example of many Jewish families fleeing pogroms to the USA, decided in 1910 to emigrate from the country. Two of his brothers had already moved to America and settled in Portland, Oregon, where they engaged in clothing manufacturing. The family split: Marcus with his mother and older sister Sonya remained in Russia for the time being, while Yakov and two children, Moishe and Abel (later Albert), emigrated in the same year, 1910.

On August 5, 1913, the steamship “Tsar” departed from Libava and arrived in New York on August 17. Among the second-class passengers were Marcus with his sister Sonya and mother. For the first ten days, they lived with relatives (the Weinsteins) in New Haven, then traveled by train to Portland.

Seven months later, Marcus’s father died of colorectal cancer, and the family was left without means of support. The children had to find work. Sonya, who had received dental education in Russia, became an accountant, while Moishe and Albert helped in the Weinstein family business until they learned English well enough to pass pharmacist exams. At that time, Marcus helped his brothers by working as a courier and selling newspapers.

In 1913, Rothko entered the third grade of a general education school, after which he was immediately transferred to the fifth grade, and at seventeen graduated with honors from Lincoln High School. Having mastered English perfectly (his fourth language), he actively participated in the life of the local Jewish community, especially in political discussions. Portland at that time was one of the centers of revolutionary activity in the USA, and Mark attended meetings of the city’s particularly strong revolutionary-syndicalist union “Industrial Workers of the World,” where he organized discussions about the 1917 revolution in Russia. He intended to become a union activist, dedicating his life to the labor movement.

In September 1921 — following the Weinstein family tradition — Rothko enrolled at Yale University, where he studied the first year thanks to a grant awarded for his excellent diploma, and later worked in a laundry to pay for his studies. At one point, making great progress in mathematics, he seriously planned a career as an engineer. At university, together with comrades Aaron Director and Simon Whitney, he published a satirical magazine aimed at exposing the vices of the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) university society, including elitism and racism.

Whether due to financial difficulties or finding classes boring, in 1923 Marcus dropped out of university. He reappeared there only forty-six years later, on the eve of his death, just to receive an honorary doctorate.

Without a clear idea of what he wanted to do, Marcus Rothko moved to New York, rented a room at 19 West 102nd Street, and immediately immersed himself in the vibrant artistic life of the big city. In the fall of 1923, while visiting a friend at an art school in New York, he saw artists painting a model. As Rothko later said, at that moment he “was born as an artist.” He began taking lessons from George Bridgman at the Art Students League of New York. Some time later, he enrolled at the New School of Design in New York, where among his teachers was one of the founders of “abstract surrealism,” Arshile Gorky. Although Rothko studied very little under Max Weber at the Art Students League—from October to December 1925 and from March to May 1926—Weber had a great influence on Rothko’s early works. From then on, he began to perceive art as a tool for emotional and religious self-expression. At that time, the young artist was impressed by the surrealist works of Paul Klee and the paintings of Georges Rouault.

In 1928, Rothko, together with a group of young artists, exhibited his works for the first time at the Opportunity Gallery. The dark expressive canvases—depictions of interiors and city sketches—were well received by critics and colleagues. Despite this modest success, Rothko still could not fully devote himself to creativity—he needed to work.

In the late 1920s, Rothko earned extra money by drawing maps for biblical historical books by writer Lewis Brown. He moved to 231 East 25th Street and in 1929 became a part-time painting and sculpture teacher at the Central Academy of the Brooklyn Jewish Center. He worked there until 1952.

In the early 1930s, Rothko met artist Adolph Gottlieb, who, along with Barnett Newman, Joseph Solman, Louis Schanker, and John Graham, was part of a group of young artists surrounding Milton Avery. According to Helen de Kooning, it was Avery who “gave Rothko the idea that [the life of a professional artist] was possible.” Avery’s abstract paintings, which used deep knowledge of form and color, had a huge influence on Rothko. Soon Rothko’s paintings acquired subjects and colors similar to Avery’s works, as seen in “Bather” or “Beach Scene 1933–1934.”

Rothko, Gottlieb, Newman, Solman, Graham, and their mentor Avery spent significant time together, vacationing in Lake George and Gloucester. During the day they painted, and in the evenings discussed art. At Lake George in 1932, Rothko met Edith Sachar, a jewelry designer, whom he married at the end of that year. The following summer, his first solo exhibition took place at the Portland Art Museum, featuring drawings and watercolors. At the exhibition, Rothko presented works by his teenage students from the Brooklyn Jewish Center Academy alongside his own.

The artist’s family opposed his decision to dedicate himself to art. During the Great Depression, the Rothkowitz family lost much; they were surprised by Marcus’s indifference and his unwillingness to take on a more “promising” and “profitable” job to help his mother.

Returning to New York, Rothko held his first solo exhibition on the East Coast at the Contemporary Arts Gallery (November 21 – December 9, 1933). He showed fifteen oil paintings, mostly portraits, as well as some watercolors and drawings. His painting especially attracted the attention of art historians. Rothko’s use of color fields was already free from Avery’s influence.

At the end of 1935, Rothko joined Ilya Bolotowsky, Ben-Zion, Adolph Gottlieb, Lou Harris, Ralph Rosenborg, Louis Schanker, and Joseph Solman to form the “Whitney Ten Dissenters.” According to the gallery exhibition catalog, the group’s mission was to “protest against the identification of American painting with the literal.”

As early as 1950, they were considered radicals, and a conservative jury did not accept their paintings for an important contemporary art exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. In response, they took a group photo of the “Angry Ones”—all with stern faces, not a hint of a smile. Mark Rothko was especially angry. Rothko’s style had already changed, approaching the famous works of his mature period, but despite his interest in studying color, the artist focused on another formal and stylistic innovation, working on surrealistic depictions of mythological stories and symbols. Organic, semi-abstract forms born of his fantasies and dreams were called biomorphic. At this time, Rothko’s authority grew, especially among the Artists’ Union. Founded in 1937, this union, which also included Gottlieb and Solman, aimed to create a municipal art gallery where independent group exhibitions could be held. In 1936, the Artists’ Union group held an exhibition at Galerie Bonaparte in France.

In 1938, another exhibition was held at the Mercury Gallery. At that time, Rothko, like many artists of that era, began working for a government organization created to overcome the consequences of the Great Depression. Artists and architects were hired to restore and renovate public buildings. Many famous artists worked for the government at that time, including Avery, de Kooning, Pollock, Reyner, David Smith, Louise Nevelson, eight artists from the Whitney Ten Dissenters, and Rothko’s teacher Arshile Gorky.

In 1936, Rothko began writing a book, which was never finished, about the similar principles of children’s drawings and the works of contemporary artists. According to Rothko, “the fact that artistic work begins with drawing is already an academic approach. We begin with color,” the artist wrote, evaluating the influence of primitive cultures on modernists and their mimicry of children’s creativity. Rothko believed that a modernist, like a child or a person of a primitive culture, should ideally express the inner feeling of form in his work without the intervention of reason. It should be a physical and emotional, but not intellectual, experience. Rothko began using color fields in his watercolors and cityscapes; it was then that subject and form in his works began to lose their semantic load. Rothko consciously sought to imitate children’s drawings.

By the early 1950s, he simplified the structure of his paintings even more, creating a series of “multiforms”—paintings consisting of several color planes. The artist himself formulated his task as “simple expression of a complex thought.” The works that already made him famous were large rectangular canvases with floating color planes of “color field” painting.

At the same time, he said: “My paintings should not be considered abstract. I have no intention of creating or emphasizing a formal relationship of color and place. I reject naturalistic depiction only to enhance the expression of the theme contained in the title.” But most of his abstract canvases had no titles.

Critics consider Rothko’s most significant work to be the cycle of 14 paintings for the chapel of the ecumenical church in Houston, Texas. In mid-1937, Mark quarreled with his wife Edith, and although they reconciled a few months later, their relationship remained strained.

In early 1938, Rothko applied for American citizenship, received it on February 21, and calmed down: he feared that the growing influence of the Nazis in Europe could provoke the sudden deportation of Jews without American citizenship. For the same reason, due to concerns about the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and America, in 1940 he shortened his name to “Mark Rothko.” The name “Rot” was still recognizable as Jewish, so he settled on “Rothko.” Since then, all his works have been signed with this creative pseudonym.

Believing that contemporary American painting had reached a conceptual dead end, Rothko intended to explore themes different from urban and natural landscapes. He sought something that could complement his growing interest in form, space, and color. The world wars gave this search a sense of urgency. Rothko insisted that the new themes be socially conditioned but could go beyond existing political symbols and values. In his essay “Suggested Romance,” published in 1949, Rothko argued that “the archaic artist… found it necessary to create a group of intermediaries, monsters, hybrids, gods, and demigods” almost as modern man found intermediaries in fascism and the communist party. For Rothko, “without monsters and gods, art cannot be dramatic.”

Rothko’s use of mythology as a commentary on contemporary history was not new. Rothko, Gottlieb, and Newman read and discussed the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. In particular, they were interested in psychoanalytic theories concerning dreams and archetypes of the collective unconscious. They understood mythological symbols as images operating in the space of human consciousness, which goes beyond specific history and culture. Rothko later said that his artistic approach was “transformed” as a result of studying “dramatic themes of myth.” He even temporarily stopped painting in 1940 to fully immerse himself in the study of mythology: James Frazer’s “The Golden Bough” and Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams.”

With his new vision, Rothko tried to satisfy the spiritual and creative needs of modern man in myth. The most important philosophical influence on Rothko during this period was Friedrich Nietzsche’s book “The Birth of Tragedy.” Nietzsche argued that Greek tragedy saved man from the horrors of earthly life. Studying new themes in modern art ceased to be Rothko’s goal. From then on, his art pursued the goal of reviving the spiritual emptiness of modern man. He believed that this emptiness arose partly due to the absence of mythology because, according to Nietzsche, “the images of myth must be unnoticed ubiquitous demonic guardians, under whose supervision the young soul grows and matures and whose signs help a person interpret his life and struggle.” Rothko believed that his art could release unconscious energy previously unleashed by mythological images, symbols, and rituals. He considered himself a “creator of myths” and proclaimed: “the exciting experience of tragedy is for me the only source of art.”

In many of his works of this period, in which he uses images mainly taken from Aeschylus’s “Oresteia” trilogy, barbaric scenes of violence contrast with civilized passivity. Rothko’s paintings of that period reflect his fascination with mythology: “Antigone,” “Oedipus,” “The Sacrifice of Iphigenia,” “Leda,” “Furies,” “Orpheus’s Altar.” Rothko uses Judeo-Christian images in “Gethsemane,” “The Last Supper,” and “Rites of Lilith.” He also refers to Egyptian (“Room in Karnak”) and Syrian (“Syrian Bull”) myth. Soon after World War II, Rothko stopped naming his paintings, designating them only by numbers, as he believed that the title of a work limits the transcendental goals of his paintings.

At the core of Rothko and Gottlieb’s ideas about archaic forms and symbols interpreting modernity, one can see the influence of surrealism, cubism, and abstractionism. In 1936, Rothko visited two exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art: “Cubism and Abstract Art” and “Fantastic Art, Dadaism, and Surrealism.” In 1942, after the success of an exhibition featuring Ernst, Miró, Wolfgang Paalen, Tanguy, and Salvador Dalí—artists who immigrated to the United States because of the war—surrealism began gaining popularity in New York. Rothko and his peers, Gottlieb and Newman, discussed the art and ideas of these European pioneers of surrealism, as well as Mondrian’s ideas, and concluded that they themselves were heirs of the European avant-garde.

The new paintings were presented at a 1942 exhibition at Macy’s department store in New York. In response to a negative review by The New York Times, Rothko and Gottlieb issued a manifesto, mostly written by Rothko. Addressing the critic’s “bewilderment” over the new work, they stated: “We stand for the simple expression of a complex thought. We stand for the large image because it has a univocal effect. We want to reaffirm the plane of the painting. We stand for flat forms because they destroy illusions and reveal truth.” In harsher terms, they criticized those who wanted to live surrounded by art that does not challenge, noting that their work must “offend anyone spiritually attuned to decoration.”

Rothko regarded myth as a resource to replenish the era of spiritual emptiness. This belief was born decades earlier thanks to the works of Carl Jung, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Thomas Mann.

On June 13, 1943, Rothko and Sachar separated again. After the divorce, Rothko suffered a long depression. Thinking that a change of scenery might help him, he returned to Portland, then went to Berkeley, where he met and befriended abstract artist Clifford Still. Still’s deeply abstract paintings, presumably, had a significant influence on Rothko’s later works. In the fall of 1943, Rothko returned to New York. He met the famous collector and art dealer Peggy Guggenheim, who was initially reluctant to take his works. At the end of 1945, Rothko’s solo exhibition at Guggenheim’s “Art of This Century” gallery was not very successful: few sales, with prices ranging from $150 to $750, and negative reviews from critics. During this period, Rothko, influenced by Still, moved away from surrealism. Rothko’s experiments interpreting the unconscious symbolism of everyday forms ended:

“I insist on the equal existence of the world generated by reason and the world generated by God outside it. If I got confused in using familiar objects, it is because I refuse to distort their appearance for an action for which they are too old to serve or for which they may never have been intended. I quarrel with surrealists and abstractionists only as a person quarrels with his father and mother; recognizing the inevitability and purpose of my roots but insisting on my disagreement; I am one with them but also completely independent of them.”

Rothko’s 1945 masterpiece “Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea” illustrates his newly found inclination toward abstraction. Some authors interpreted the painting as an image of Marcus courting his future second wife, Mary Ellen “Mell” Beistle, whom he met in 1944 and married in early 1945. Others noted echoes of Botticelli’s masterpiece “The Birth of Venus.” The painting, in subtle gray and brown tones, depicts two human figures in a swirling moving atmosphere consisting of various forms and colors. The harsh rectangular background foreshadows Rothko’s later experiments with pure color. It is no coincidence that the painting was completed in the year World War II ended.

Despite abandoning his “mythomorphic abstractionism,” until the late 1940s Rothko was still primarily known for his surrealist works. The Whitney Museum included them in its annual contemporary art exhibitions from 1943 to 1950.

The year 1946 in the artist’s work was marked by the creation of what art historians called Rothko’s “multiform” paintings. Although Rothko himself never used this term, it accurately describes his paintings. But the artist described such paintings as having a more organic structure and as elements of human expression. For him, these blurred blocks of different colors, devoid of landscapes, human figures, and especially symbols, possessed their own life energy. They contained the “breath of life” that he did not find in the figurative painting of that era. They were full of possibilities, while his experiments with mythological symbolism became a tiring formula. “Multiformity” led Rothko to realize his mature signature style, which he would adhere to until the end of his life.

In the middle of this critical transitional period, Rothko was impressed by Clifford Still’s abstractions, which were partially influenced by the landscapes of Still’s native North Dakota. In 1947, during summer semester studies at the California School of Fine Arts, Rothko and Still began developing the idea of creating their own curriculum, which they implemented the following year in New York, calling it the “Subject of the Artists’ School.” Among the artists they attracted were David Hare and Robert Motherwell. Although the school ceased to exist the same year, it nevertheless became a center of modern art.

In addition to his teaching experience, Rothko began publishing articles in two new art magazines: “Tiger’s Eye” and “Viewpoints.” Using these publications as an opportunity to comment on the current art scene, Rothko also discussed his own work and art philosophy in detail. In his articles, he expressed a desire to exclude figurative elements from painting, showing particular interest in debates about art initiated in Wolfgang Paalen’s publication “Form and Meaning” (1945). Rothko described his new method as “unknown adventures in unknown space,” free from “direct connection with any specific organism.” Breslin interpreted this transition as: “…now both personality and painting are fields of possibility… an effect conveyed by creating a variety of all kinds of indefinite forms.”

In 1949, Rothko was fascinated by Henri Matisse’s painting “The Red Studio” (a variant translation: “The Red Workshop”), acquired that year by the Museum of Modern Art. He later called this painting one of the key sources of inspiration for his later abstract paintings.

Soon, the “multiforms” turned into a signature style. In early 1949, Rothko exhibited new works at the Betty Parsons Gallery. For critic Harold Rosenberg, the paintings were nothing short of a revelation. After painting his first “multiform,” Rothko secluded himself in his home in East Hampton on Long Island. He invited only a few select people, including Rosenberg, to see the new paintings. The debut of his final form coincided with a difficult period in the artist’s life: in October 1948, his mother Kate died.

Rothko began actively using two (sometimes three) symmetrical rectangular blocks of contrasting but complementary colors, in which, for example, “the rectangles sometimes seem to merge with the ground, enhancing the concentration of their essence. The green stripe in the painting ‘Purple, Black, Green on Orange’ seems to vibrate against the orange around it, creating an optical flicker.” Moreover, for the next seven years, Rothko painted only on large vertical canvases. Large-scale projects were used to shake the viewer or, in Rothko’s words, to make the viewer feel “enveloped” by the painting. For some critics, the large size was an attempt to compensate for a lack of essence.

In the spring of 1968, Rothko was diagnosed with an arterial aneurysm. Ignoring the doctor’s recommendations, the artist continued to drink heavily, smoke, and refused to follow a diet, but he heeded the advice not to take on large canvases taller than a meter and began working in more compact formats. His marriage to Mell Beistle was in a severe crisis at that time, and the artist’s health problems only worsened the situation. On the first day of the new year 1969, they divorced, and Rothko moved to live in his studio.

On February 25, 1970, Rothko’s assistant Oliver Steindecker found the artist lying unconscious on the floor of his own kitchen with slashed veins, in a pool of blood; the razor he used to cut himself lay nearby. At the moment of discovery, Rothko was already dead. An autopsy showed that before his suicide, he had taken a huge dose of antidepressants.

Mell Beistle died on August 26, 1970, six months and one day after Mark Rothko. The cause of death listed on her death certificate was hypertension caused by cardiovascular disease.

Rothko was buried at the East Marion Cemetery on Long Island. In 2006, the artist’s children, Kate Rothko-Pritz and Christopher Rothko, petitioned to reinter their father’s remains at Kensico Cemetery next to their mother. In April 2008, Judge Arthur Pitts granted permission for the reburial.

Source:

https://sovremennoe-iskusstvo.ru/hudozhniki/mark-rothko/

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ротко,_Марк