Mark Rothko Biography
Mark Rothko was a Latvian-born American painter and printmaker. He is classified as an abstract expressionist.
Mark Rothko was born Marcus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Russia on September 25, 1903, the fourth child of Jacob Rothkowitz, a pharmacist. Rothko and his family immigrated to the United States when he was ten years old, and settled in Portland, Oregon. Rothko attended Yale University in 1921.
In 1923 while visiting a friend at the Art Students League of New York that he witnessed students sketching a model. According to Rothko, this was the beginning of his life as an artist. He joined a theater group run by Clark Gable’s wife, Josephine Dillon.Rothko enrolled in the New School of Design, where one of his instructors was the artist Arshile Gorky. This was probably his first encounter with a member of the "avant-garde".
Rothko had his first East Coast one-man show at the Contemporary Arts Gallery, showing fifteen oil paintings, mostly portraits, along with some aquarelles and drawings.Rothko continued on in government service, working for TRAP, an agency that employed artists, architects and laborers in the restoration and renovation of public buildings.In 1936, Rothko began writing a book, never completed, about similarities in the art of children and the work of modern painters.Rothko and a number of other artists formed the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. Their aim was to keep their art free from political propaganda. A rise of Nazi sympathy in the United States heightened Rothko's fears of antisemitism, and in January 1940, he abbreviated his name from "Marcus Rothkowitz" to "Mark Rothko".Rothko seemed to have had a revelation, which explains the progression of his later works toward mature, rectangular fields of color and light, that later culminated – or self-destructed – in his final works for the Rothko Chapel.He got inspiration from mythology.He apparently stopped painting altogether for the length of 1940, and read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and Frazer’s Golden Bough.The Rothko Chapel is located adjacent to the Menil Collection and The University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. The building is small, windowless, and unassuming. It is a geometric, "postmodern" structure, located in a turn-of-the-century middle-class Houston neighborhood. The Chapel, the Menil Collection, and the nearby Cy Twombly gallery were funded by Texas oil millionaires John and Dominique de Menil.
In 1968, Rothko suffered an aneurysm of the aorta, a result of his chronic high blood pressure.He died on On February 25, 1970.Shortly before his death, Rothko and his financial advisor, Bernard Reis, had created a foundation intended to fund "research and education" that would receive the bulk of Rothko’s work following his death.