Mark Rothko

(Skip to bullet points (best for students))

Born: 1903

Died: 1970

Summary of Mark Rothko

A significant character among the artists in the New York School, Mark Rothko went through many creative approaches to achieve the 1950s theme of soft rectangular shapes that floated on a stained-colored background. He was strongly inspired by mythology and philosophy, and insisted that his work was full of substance and ideas. Rothko was a strong advocate for social revolutionary thinking and the freedom to self-expression. In many articles and critical reviews, he also explained his ideas.

Rothko’s work, highly influenced by Nietzsche, Greek mythology and his Russian-Jewish background, was deeply infused with emotional depth, which he expressed via a number of techniques that spanned from figurative to abstract.

Rothko’s early figurative work – landscapes, silent life, figure studies and portraits – has shown that Expressionism and Surrealism may be combined. His quest for new forms of expression led to works in his Hue Field which conveyed a feeling of spirituality by using shimmering colour.

All his life, Rothko retained his youth’s social revolutionary ideals. In particular, he advocated the free expression of artists, which he believed had been affected by the market. This viewpoint frequently puts him in conflict with the art industry, prompting him to react to criticism publicly and sometimes to reject commissions, sales and exhibits.

Childhood

Marcus Rothkovych was born in Dvinsk, Russia (now Latvia), the fourth child born to Jacob and Anna Rothkovych. In 1910, Jacob moved to the US with his two oldest boys, since Russia was unfriendly to Zionist Jews, and in 1913 ultimately sent for the rest of his family. They moved in Portland, Oregon, but just a few months after the arrival of their family, Jacob died and required them to live in their new homeland, although they knew only Hebrew and Russian. Rothko was forced to learn English and go to work when he was young and his upbringing was lingeringly unpleasant. He early graduated from Lincoln High School and showed greater interest in music than visual arts. He received a scholarship to Yale University, but quickly found the Yale atmosphere conservative and restrictive.

Early Life

When Rothko left Yale, he went “to bum about and starve a bit.” to New York City. In the following several years, during his enrolment in Max Weber’s quiet life, he did strange jobs and attended the Art Students League drawing courses which were his sole creative instruction. The early paintings of Rothko mostly consisted of portraits, nude and urban settings. Following a short stay to Portland in the theatre, Rothko was selected to take part in 1928 in an Opportunity Gallery group exhibition alongside Lou Harris and Milton Avery. It was a triumph for a young immigrant who had only started painting three years ago.

MidPeriod

By the mid-1930s, the impacts of the Great Depression were felt in American culture and the social and political repercussions of widespread unemployment had been taken into account by Rothko. This inspired him to join the communist Artists’ Union gatherings. Here, he and many other artists were fighting for a municipal gallery that was finally given, among other things. Rothko met many other artists at the Easel division of the Works Progress Authority, but he felt quite comfortable with a group comprised primarily of fellow Russian Jewish artists. This trio, consisting of Adolph Gottlieb, Joseph Solman and John Graham, exhibited together at the Gallery Secession in 1934 and became known as the Ten. In 1936, The Ten: Whitney Dissidents demonstrated at the Mercury Gallery, debuting three days after the Whitney exhibition.

In the 1930s, his expressionist-influenced artwork was characterised by claustrophobic urban landscapes frequently turned into acidic hues (for example, Entrance to the Subway (1938). But in the 1940s, Surrealism started to affect him, and for more abstractive imagery he gave up Expressionism that split human, plant and animal forms. He compared this to antique symbols, which he believed might convey the emotions of old tales. Rothko came to view humanity engaged in a mythical fight for his nature and free choice. He paused shortly in 1939 to study mythology and philosophy and found special resonance in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. He stopped to be concerned in depiction and was captivated with the articulation of inner emotion.

During the whole life of Rothko, his serious sadness and an undetected bipolar illness haunted him. He married Edith Sachar in 1932, but divorced her in 1945 to marry Mary Alice Beistel with whom he wanted to have two children.

While Rothko tends to be one of the three main founders of Color Field Painting along with Newman and Still, Rothko’s works have seen numerous sudden, clearly defined stylistic changes. The crucial change occurred towards the end of the 1940s, when he started to create prototypes of his best-known works. Since then, they have been known as his “multi-forms” The figures have been banned completely, and the compositions are dominated by numerous soft coloured blocks that appear to float in space. All barriers between the painter, the picture and the spectator were removed by Rothko. The technique he employed utilised shimmering colour to flood the visual field of the observer. His paintings are designed to surround the spectator completely and to elevate the viewer from the mechanical, commercial world over which artists like as Rothko have been desperated. In 1949 Rothko significantly decreased the quantity of shapes in his images, so they filled the lens, floating over the coloured fields which are visible only on their edges. These are his best-known paintings and Rothko believed they fulfilled his goal to create universal emblems of human need better. He stated that his paintings were not self-expressions, but comments on the situation of man.

Rothko would keep working on the “sectionals” till the end of his life. They are regarded very perplexing since they officially disagree with their intention. Rothko himself said that the increasing clarity of its contents inspired the modifications in his approach. The all-over compositions, the blurred borders, the continuity of colour and the fullness of form were all components of his growth towards Rothko’s sublime and transcendental aim. “The progression of a painter’s work, as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity,” he said, “toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer.”

In his career Rothko won numerous accolades, including his invitation to be one of the U.S. representatives at the 1958 Venice Biennial. But applause never seemed to ease Rothko’s struggling soul, and he was known to be rude and aggressive. When the Guggenheim Foundation awarded him, he rejected it as a protest against the notion that art must be competitive. He always was strong and straightforward in his convictions: “I am not an Abstractionist,” he once remarked. He distanced himself from the description of his work as “non-objective color-filled painting.” Rather, he emphasised that his paintings centred on “tragedy, ecstasy, doom.” human emotions. He argued that art did not relate to the sense of formal connections, but was comprehensible in human existence. He also refused to be a colorist – yet colour was important to his works.

Rothko frequently stood up for his convictions, albeit it cost him dearly. In a self-defeating act of retribution, he rejected Whitney’s invitation in 1953 to buy two of his paintings “a deep sense of responsibility for the life my pictures will lead out in the world.” Another key project that tragically ended was the sequence of paintings for the 1958 Seagram Building. Initially he was attracted by the notion of integrating his work into the architectural context since he really admired the Michelangelo and Vasari chapels. He spent two years in this building creating three series of paintings, but he was not happy with the first two sets. He was then unhappy with the notion of his paintings hanging in his luxurious Four Seasons restaurant. Rothko’s social beliefs often drove him away from the assignment, since he could not combine his own vision or integrity as an artist with the showy setting.

Late LIfe

In 1964, Rothko was commissioned by leading art collectors and benefactors from Houston, John and Dominique de Menil. He was to construct big wall walls for a non-denominational chapel, which was sponsored by Dominique on the St. Thomas Catholic University campus. While working closely with a number of architects, he produced 14 paintings to create a contemplative atmosphere with a dark palette. Since then, the Rothko Chapel has hosted worldwide gatherings of some of the world’s major religious leaders, such as the Dalai Lama.

Rothko had an aortic aneurysm in 1968 and was in a hospital for three weeks. For the rest of his life, this brush with death would shadow him. He was angry that his work was not respected properly and he thought it deserved regard. He also started concern that his art would have no significant legacy, which prompted him to embark on his last major series, Black on Grays, which comprised 25 paintings and clearly distinguished him from his earlier work.

At the age of sixty-six, Rothko committed himself by taking an overdose of anti-depressants and cutting his arms with a razor blade. His assistant Oliver Steindecker came in the East 69th Street studio in the morning on February 25, 1970, to discover him on the floor of the blood-filled restroom. Many of his friends were not shocked to hear that he had lost his enthusiasm and motivation, taking his life. Some believed that Rothko had, like others who had perished before internal struggles such as Arshile Gorky, succumbed to the rite of self-destruction of the tormented artist.

Three of his closest friends were appointed trustees of his estate in the aftermath of his death, covertly transferring ownership of 800 artworks to the Marlborough Gallery, a split of their market value, for many years. The daughter of Rothko, Kate, brought the men and the gallery to court for a famously nasty and lengthy quarrel. During the protracted court fight, for the first time, art world’s often illegal and immoral activities were publicly revealed. Robert Hughes, a time critic, described “Rothko case” as what he termed the “death of Abstract Expressionism” Finally, the children of Rothko won the lawsuit and got half the estate.

Famous Art by Mark Rothko

Entrance to Subway

1938

This early figurative painting shows Rothko’s fascination in modern urban life. The station’s architectonic elements are restored, including the towers and the “N” on the wall. While the tone of the images is slightly relaxed by impressionism, it represents many of the artist’s emotions about the contemporary metropolis. New York City was seen as soulless and unnatural, and part of it is transmitted in the nameless characteristics of the figures.

Four Darks in Red

1958

In 1969, Rothko showed 10 paintings at the Sydney Janis Gallery, including four Darks in Red. The painting, with its dark, limited palette, illustrates Rothko’s late-period gravity to Reds and Browns. It created a prototype to utilise the dark red/brown/black palette and horizontal composition in the Seagram Building, which he subsequently removed. Although the iconography of Four Darks in Red seems far off from Slow Swirl at the seafront in 1944, Rothko thought that the rectangles were simply a new method to depict the presences or spirits in the previous works. “It was not that the figure had been removed,” he once remarked, “..but the symbols for the figures… These new shapes say.. what the figures said.” Thus Rothko envisioned a kind of direct connection between himself and the spectator that might affect the viewer with more spirituality.

Untitled, Black on Gray

1969

Rothko invited a large number of the global art elite in New York to see his newest and his final series of paintings, the Black on Grays, at his studio. Although the incident was mostly silent, others believed these were premonitions of his death. Others believed that lunar images were prevalent in popular culture and were interpretations of moon landscapes, while others felt they were photographic pictures shot at night. They were not taken too seriously in general, which was heartbreaking for Rothkos, but also because he frequently thought that he understood the inner universe of his paintings alone. The Black on Grays have been painted directly on white linen and Rothko preferred to “paint against.” without the customary underpinting. Working in just two registers, he drastically limited the colours and reduced the canvas to a more accessible and personal dimension. The dramatic contrast of light and darkness creates a sorrow which has been like a mythical and tragic psychological drama.

BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)

Best for Students and a Huge Time Saver

• A significant character among the artists in the New York School, Mark Rothko went through many creative approaches to achieve the 1950s theme of soft rectangular shapes that floated on a stained-colored background.
• He was strongly inspired by mythology and philosophy, and insisted that his work was full of substance and ideas.
• Rothko was a strong advocate for social revolutionary thinking and the freedom to self-expression.
• In many articles and critical reviews, he also explained his ideas.Rothko’s work, highly influenced by Nietzsche, Greek mythology and his Russian-Jewish background, was deeply infused with emotional depth, which he expressed via a number of techniques that spanned from figurative to abstract.Rothko’s early figurative work – landscapes, silent life, figure studies and portraits – has shown that Expressionism and Surrealism may be combined.
• His quest for new forms of expression led to works in his Hue Field which conveyed a feeling of spirituality by using shimmering colour.All his life, Rothko retained his youth’s social revolutionary ideals.
• In particular, he advocated the free expression of artists, which he believed had been affected by the market.
• This viewpoint frequently puts him in conflict with the art industry, prompting him to react to criticism publicly and sometimes to reject commissions, sales and exhibits.

Information Citations

En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.

Recommend0 recommendationsPublished in Artists