MARK ROTHKO:
A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY
Mark Rothko was born Marcus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk,
Russia, on September 25, 1903. His parents were Jacob and Anna Goldin
Rothkowitz, and Rothko was raised in a well-educated family with Zionist
leanings. At the age of ten, Rothko, his mother and sister immigrated
to America to join his father and brothers, who had previously settled
in Portland, Oregon.
From 1921 to 1923 Rothko attended Yale
University on a full scholarship and then moved to New York City. In
1924 he enrolled in the Art Students League, studying with George
Bridgman and Max Weber, in whose class he befriended Louis Harris. In
1929 Rothko began teaching children at the Center Academy of the Brooklyn
Jewish Center, a position he retained for more then twenty years. He
was given his first one-man exhibition in 1933 at the Museum of Art
in Portland and his first in New York a few months later at the Contemporary
Arts Gallery.
The New York exhibition included landscapes,
nudes, portraits, and city scenes. At the end of 1934 Rothko participated
in an exhibition at the Gallery Secession, whose members included
Louis Harris, Adolph Gottlieb, Ilya Bolotowsky and Joseph Solman; several
months later they left the Secession to form their own group,
the Ten, which exhibited together eight times between 1935 and
1939. Rothko's paintings in the Ten's exhibitions were
expressionist in style. During this period he was employed by the
WPA (Works Progress Administration), where he produced many
subway scenes emphasizing the isolation of the riders. From the later
1930s to 1946 Rothko's oil and watercolor paintings reflected his interest
in Greek mythology, primitive art, and Christian tragedy. Influenced
by the Surrealists
Miró and André Masson, among others, he explored the technique
of automatic drawing in creating abstract, diaphanous forms that allude
to human and animal life.
In 1940, Rothko, along with his colleagues
Gottlieb, Bolotowsky, and Harris, broke with the American
Artists' Congress on political grounds and became founding members
of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. In 1945 he
was given a one-man exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery Art
of This Century, which featured his surrealist works. At the end
of the year he was included in the Whitney Museum of America Art's
Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting. In 1948 he
joined William Baziotes, David Hare, and Robert Motherwell in founding
an art school, the Subjects of the Artist, which closed within
a year.
By 1947 Rothko had eliminated all elements of surrealism
or mythic imagery from his works, and nonobjective compositions of indeterminate
shapes emerged. Within three years he reached his signature format,
painting two or three soft-edged, luminescent rectangles, stacked weightlessly
on top of one another, floating horizontally against a ground.
In 1954 he was given a one-man exhibition
by the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1958 Rothko accepted his
first commission for a series of paintings for the Four Seasons
restaurant in New York. He received his second commission for murals
in 1961 for the Holyoke Center at Harvard University.
From 1964 to 1967 Rothko worked on his third and last commission in
an interdenominational chapel in Houston designed by Philip Johnson
which is now called The Rothko Chapel. From 1968 on, he worked
in acrylic on canvas and paper, reducing his palette to brown, gray,deep
red and black. Rothko was elected to the National Institute of Arts
and Letters in 1968. The following year Yale University awarded
him an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree. In 1970 Rothko committed
suicide in his studio.
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