Mark Rothko

File:Mark rothko 1957 no 20.JPG

Mark Rothko's painting 1957 # 20 (1957)

Mark Rothko born Marcus Rothkowitz (September 25, 1903 – February 25, 1970) was a Latvian-born American painter and printmaker who is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he rejected not only the label but even being an abstract painter.

Childhood

Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Latvia. His father Jacob was a pharmacist and an intellectual, who provided his children with a secular and political, rather than religious upbringing. However, following the Russian pogrom against Jews, incited by the 1905 revolution, Jacob repented and became a Baal teshuva. Rothko’s early childhood was plagued with fear, as he witnessed the occasional violence brought down upon Jews by Cossacks attempting to stifle revolutionary uprisings. An image that remained with him throughout his adult life was that of dug-up pits, where Cossacks were alleged to have buried Jews they kidnapped and murdered.

Rothko was sent to the cheder at age five, where he studied the Talmud. This had the adverse effect of stigmatizing him as an outsider within his own family, as his elders were educated in the public school system. As a Jew, the young Marcus was therefore an outsider among outsiders.

Emigration to the US

Fearing that his sons were about to be drafted into the Czarist army, Rothko's father Jacob decided to emigrate to the United States, following the path of many other Jews who left Dvinsk in the wake of the Cossack purges, including two of his brothers.

Marcus started school in America in 1913 and in 1921 graduated with honors, at Lincoln High School in Portland at the age of seventeen. He became an active member of the Jewish community center, where he proved adept at political discussions. Like his father, Marcus was liberal and passionate about such issues as worker’s rights and women’s right to contraception. However,Rothko’s political convictions were typical of his culture and upbringing and mostly rhetorical.

Following graduation, he received a scholarship to Yale and later dropped out after the funds ran out and he found himself turned off by the bourgeoisie culture of the university. 46 years later Yale gave him an honorary degree.

Artistic apprenticeship

While visiting a friend in the Fall of 1923 at the Art Students League of New York ROthko witnessed students sketching a nude model. According to Rothko, this was the beginning of his life as an artist. He was twenty years old and had taken some art classes in high school but his initial experience was far from an immediate calling. Rothko moved to New York and enrolled in the New School of Design, where one of his instructors was the artist Arshile Gorky, probably his first encounter with a member of the avant-garde. That Autumn, he took courses at the Art Students League of New York taught by still-life artist Max Weber, another Russian Jew. It was from Weber that Rothko began to see art as a tool of emotional and religious expression and Rothko’s earliest paintings portray a Weberian influence.

Rothko's circle

Rothko's move to New York provided a fertile atmosphere for the experience of art from all cultures and periods. In 1928, Rothko had his own showing with a group of young artists at the appropriately named Opportunity Gallery. His paintings covered dark, moody, expressionist interiors as well as urban scenes and were generally well-accepted among critics and peers. Despite some growing 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 Sloman and John Graham, was part of a group of young artists surrounding the painter Milton Avery, 15 years Rothko’s senior. Avery’s stylized natural scenes, utilizing a rich knowledge of form and color, would be a tremendous influence on Rothko, whose own paintings soon after meeting Avery, began to address similar subject matter and color, as in Rothko’s 1933/34 Bathers, or Beach Scene.

Rothko, Gottlieb, Newman, Sloman, Graham and their mentor Avery, spent considerable time together, vacationing at Lake George and Gloucester, Massachusetts, spending their days painting and their evenings discussing art. Avery was very generous with his attention to these young artists, hosting literary readings and giving courses to them on nude drawings. During a 1932 visit to Lake George, Rothko met Edith Sachar, a jewelry designer. The two were married on November 12th and maintained, at first, a close and mutually supportive relationship. The following summer, Rothko’s first one-man show was held at the Portland Art Museum, consisting mostly of drawings and aquarelles, as well as the works of Rothko’s pre-adolescent students from the Center Academy. His family was unable to understand his decision to be an artist, especially at a time when the Depression was at its all time worst. Having suffered serious financial setbacks, the Rothkoviches 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.

First one-man show in New York

Returning to New York, unhampered by his lack of family support, Rothko had his first large one-man show at the Contemporary Arts Gallery, showing 15 oil paintings, mostly portraits, along with some aquarelles and drawings. In late 1935 Rothko (Marcus Rothkowitz)joined with Ilya Bolotowsky, Ben-Zion, Adolph Gottlieb, Lou Harris, Ralph Rosenborg, Lou Schankerand Joe Solomon to form "The Ten" (Whitney Ten Dissenters,) whose mission it was (according to a catalog from a 1937 Mercury Gallery show,) "to protest against the reputed equivalence of American painting and literal painting."

Development of style

In 1936, Rothko began writing a book, never completed, about the similarities in the art of children and the work of modern painters. The work of modernists, influenced by primitive art, could be compared to that of children in that "child art," according to Rothko, "transforms itself into primitivism, which is only the child producing a mimicry of himself." In this same manuscript, he observed that "the fact that one usually begins with drawing is already academic. We start with color." The modernist artist, like the child and the primitive whom he is influenced by, expresses an innate feeling for form that is, in the best and most universal work, expressed without mental interference; it is a physical and emotional, non-intellectual experience.

This period, between the primitivist and playful urban scenes and aquarelles of the early period and the late, transcendent fields of color, is one of transition, incorporating elements from both his early and late periods. It is marked by a rich and often complex milieu provoked mostly by two important events in Rothko’s life: the onset of World War and his reading of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Artistic Maturity

Inspiration from mythology

For Rothko, "without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama . . . when they were abandoned as untenable superstitions, art sank into melancholy." Subsequently, the "great achievements" of civilizations that accepted the improbability of myth "are those of the single human figure alone in a moment of utter immobility" able to "indicate its concern with the fact of morality and an insatiable appetite for ubiquitous experience in the face of this fact," in order that one might, free from gods and monsters, be capable of "breathing and stretching one’s arms again." This "human figure alone in a moment of utter immobility" served as a prototype for the paintings of Rothko's final, signature style, those marvelous fields of radiating color, alone and yet wholly of that other, transcendent image toward which the mythological refers.

Rothko’s use of mythology as a commentary on current history was by no means novel. Rothko, Gottlieb and Newman read and discussed the works of Freud and Jung, in particular their respective theories concerning dreams and the archetypes of the collective unconscious, and understood mythological symbols as images that refer to themselves, operating in a space of human consciousness that transcends specific history and culture. Rothko later said his artistic approach was "reformed" by his study of the "dramatic themes of myth." He apparently stopped painting altogether for the length of 1940, and read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and Frazer’s Golden Bough.

Influence of Nietzsche

Yet the most crucial book for Rothko in this period would be Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.

Rothko’s new vision would therefore attempt to address modern man’s spiritual and creative mythological requirements and would, as Nietzsche claimed Greek tragedy had, seek to redeem man from the terrors of a mortal life. Modern artistic aims ceased to be Rothko’s goal. From this point on, his art would bear as its ultimate aim the burden of relieving modern man’s fundamental spiritual emptiness, an emptiness created in part by the lack of a mythology to properly address, as Nietzsche wrote, "the growth of a child’s mind and . . . to a mature man his life and struggles" and to provide the aesthetic recognition necessary for the freeing of those unconscious energies previously liberated by the mythological images, symbols and rituals.

Break with Surrealism

Rothko’s one-man show at the Guggenheim in late 1945 resulted in few sales (priced between $150 and $750) and less-than-favorable reviews. Sensing that his art was becoming passé and no longer a viable medium for the direction he was moving (stimulated by Still’s abstract landscapes of color), Rothko broke with the Surrealists, explaining:

Rothko could no longer bring himself to continue interpreting the unconscious symbolism of everyday forms. The experiment had run its course. His future lay with abstraction; in it, Rothko found release from the Surrealist program of the humanist impulse to mere "memory and hallucination." His 1945 masterpiece Slow Swirl at Edge of Sea magnificently illustrates Rothko’s newfound propensity towards abstraction. Interpreted by many critics as a meditation on Rothko’s courtship of his second wife Mell, the painting presents two humanlike forms embraced in a swirling, floating atmosphere of shapes and colors, subtle grays and browns. The rigid rectangular background foreshadows Rothko’s later experiments in pure color. The painting was completed, not coincidentally, the year the Second World War ended.

Multiforms

1946 saw the creation of Rothko’s new "multiform" paintings. In viewing the catalogue raisonne, one finds a gradual metamorphosis from surrealistic, myth-influenced paintings of the early part of the decade to those highly abstract, Clyfford Still-influenced forms of pure color. The term "multiform" is applied by art critics; it was never utilized by Rothko himself, yet it is an accurate description of these paintings, which, as with his paintings of the latter part of the previous decade, are best viewed as a period of transition from that of surrealism to abstraction.

Signature period

It was not long before the "multiforms" developed into the signature style; by early 1949 Rothko exhibited these new works at the Betty Parsons Gallery. For critic Harold Rosenberg, the paintings were nothing short of a revelation. Rothko had, after painting his first "multiform," secluded himself to his home in East Hampton on Long Island, only inviting a select few, including Rosenberg, to view the new paintings. The discovery of his definitive form came at a period of great distress to the artist; his mother Kate died in October 1948 and it was at some point during that winter that Rothko happened upon the striking symmetrical rectangular blocks of two to three opposing or contrasting, yet complementary colors. Additionally, for the next seven years, Rothko painted in oil only on large canvas with vertical formats. This considerably large proportion was utilized in order to overwhelm the viewer, or, in Rothko’s words, to make the viewer feel enveloped within the painting.

Many of the "multiforms" and early signature paintings display an affinity for bright, vibrant colors, particularly reds and yellows, expressing energy and ecstasy. By the mid 1950’s however, close to a decade before the completion of the first "multiforms," Rothko began to employ dark blues and greens; for many critics of his work this shift in colors was representative of a growing darkness within Rothko’s personal life.

The Chapel

The Rothko Chapel is located adjacent to the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. The building is small, windowless, and unassuming; a decidedly geometric, postmodern structure in a decidedly postmodern, pre-fabricated neighborhood. The Chapel, the Menil Collection, and the nearby Cy Twombly gallery were funded by Texas oil millionaires John and Dominique de Menil.

For Rothko, the Chapel was to be a destination, a place of pilgrimage far from the center of art (in this case, New York) where seekers of Rothko’s "religious" artwork, could journey. That one had to journey specifically to see his artwork implied an already sympathetic audience in an increasingly indifferent postmodernist art market. Initially, the Chapel, now non-denominational, was to be specifically Roman Catholic, and the three years Rothko worked on the project (1964-67) he believed it would remain as such. Thus Rothko’s design of the building and the religious implications of the paintings were inspired by Roman Catholic art and architecture.

The Chapel is the culmination of six years of Rothko’s life and, for some viewers, it as well culminates a career in art that charted a gradually growing concern for the transcendent. For some, to witness these paintings is to submit one’s self to a spiritual experience, through its transcendence of subject matter into the realm of pure color the paintings remove the merely historical, symbolic, local and metaphoric trappings of specific denominational artistic expressions of the spirit allowing for an experience approximating that of consciousness itself. It forces one to approach the limits of experience in the post-Kantian sense of the categories of space and time and awakens one to the awareness of one’s own existence.

Suicide

In the spring of 1968, Rothko suffered an aneurysm of the aorta, a result of his chronic high blood pressure. Ignoring doctor’s orders, Rothko continued to drink and smoke heavily, avoid exercise and maintain an unhealthy diet. However, he followed the advice not to paint pictures larger than a yard in height and turned his attention to smaller formats, including acrylics on paper. Due to impotence, Rothko and his wife Mell separated on New Year’s Day 1969, and he moved into his studio. Sensing the end was near, Rothko and his financial advisor, Bernard Reis, created a foundation intended to fund "research and education" that would receive the bulk of Rothko’s work following his death. (Reis later sold the paintings to the Marlborough Gallery at a considerable loss and pocketed the difference with Gallery representatives, the result of which was one of the longest and most heavily hyped legal battles in art history.)

On February 25, 1970, Oliver Steindecker, Rothko’s assistant, found the artist in his kitchen, lying dead on the floor in front of the sink, covered in blood. His arms had been sliced open with a razor lying at his side. During autopsy it was discovered he had also overdosed on anti-depressants. He was 66 years old.

Quotations

• "I am not an abstract painter. I am not interested in the relationship between form and color. The only thing I care about is the expression of man's basic emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, destiny."

• "The role of the artist, of course, has always been that of image-maker. Different times require different images. Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality. To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time. "

• "Certain people always say we should go back to nature. I notice they never say we should go forward to nature."

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Breslin, J.E.B. Mark Rothko - A Biography, Chicago, London, University of Chicago Press, 1993.
• Chave, Anne. Mark Rothko, 1903-1970: A Retrospective. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
• Hopkins, David, After Modern Art: 1945-2000, Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-19-284234-X
• Rothko, Mark (1999). The Individual and the Social. In Harrison, Charles & Paul Wood (Eds.), Art in Theory 1900-1990 An Anthology of Changing Ideas (563-565). Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd.
• Marika Herskovic, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey, (New York School Press, 2003.) ISBN 0-9677994-1-4

External links

• "Mark Rothko", National Gallery of Art, Retrieved July 24, 2007.
• "Home Page", The Rothko Chapel, Retrieved July 24, 2007.
• "Mark Rothko's Gravesite", Find A Grave, Retrieved July 24, 2007.
• "Mark Rothko Online", Artcyclopedia, Retrieved July 24, 2007.
• "Essay on Mark Rothko", Mental Contagion, Retrieved July 24, 2007.

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

• Mark Rothko  ^history

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

• History of "Mark Rothko"

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.