b.
1903, Dvinsk, Russia; d. 1970, New York City
Mark Rothko was born Marcus Rothkowitz on September 25,
1903, in Dvinsk, Russia (now Latvia). In 1913 he left Russia
and settled with the rest of his family in Portland, Oregon.
Rothko attended Yale University, New Haven, on a scholarship
from 1921 to 1923. That year he left Yale without receiving
a degree and moved to New York. In 1925 he studied under Max
Weber at the Art Students League. He participated in his
first group exhibition at the Opportunity Galleries, New
York, in 1928. During the early 1930s Rothko became a close
friend of Milton Avery and Adolph Gottlieb. His first solo
show took place at the Portland Art Museum in 1933.
Rothko’s first solo exhibition in New York was held at
the Contemporary Arts Gallery in 1933. In 1935 he was a
founding member of the Ten, a group of artists sympathetic
to abstraction and Expressionism
[more]. He executed easel paintings for the WPA Federal Art
Project from 1936 to 1937. By 1936 Rothko knew Barnett
Newman. In the early 1940s he worked closely with Gottlieb,
developing a painting style with mythological content,
simple flat shapes, and imagery inspired by primitive art.
By mid-decade his work incorporated Surrealist techniques
and images. Peggy Guggenheim gave Rothko a solo show at Art
of This Century in New York in 1945.
In 1947 and 1949 Rothko taught at the California School
of Fine Arts, San Francisco, where Clyfford Still was a
fellow instructor. With William Baziotes, David Hare, and
Robert Motherwell, Rothko founded the short-lived Subjects
of the Artist school in New York in 1948. The late 1940s and
early 1950s saw the emergence of Rothko’s mature style, in
which frontal, luminous rectangles seem to hover on the
canvas surface. In 1958 the artist began his first
commission, monumental paintings for the Four Seasons
Restaurant in New York. The Museum of Modern Art, New York,
gave Rothko an important solo exhibition in 1961. He
completed murals for Harvard University in 1962 and in 1964
accepted a mural commission for an interdenominational
chapel in Houston. Rothko took his own life on February 25,
1970, in his New York studio. A year later the Rothko Chapel
in Houston was dedicated.