Mark Rothko
The mystic of colour fields.
Rothko painted large rectangles of colour floating one above the other. He wanted to evoke basic emotions and hated being called an abstract formalist.
Mark Rothko was born Markus Rotkovich in 1903 in Dvinsk, in present-day Latvia, which then belonged to Russia. The family was Jewish and emigrated in 1913 to Portland, Oregon. He won a scholarship to Yale but dropped out and moved to New York, where he studied at the Art Students League. For a long time he earned his living teaching children. In 1940 he began using the name Mark Rothko.
In the 1930s he painted figurative pictures, including people in the subway. In the early 1940s, like several of his colleagues in New York, he turned to myths and ancient tragedies and painted in a Surrealist style. After that his pictures became increasingly abstract, with floating patches of colour that have been called multiforms.
Around 1949–50 he found the format he would keep: two or three rectangular fields of colour with soft, blurred edges floating one above the other on a large canvas. He painted in many thin layers, so that the colour seems to glow from within. He wanted the viewer to stand close and be engulfed by the picture. He refused to be called an abstract formalist and maintained that his pictures were about basic human emotions such as tragedy, ecstasy and doom. He said that people who weep before his pictures are having the same religious experience he had when he painted them.
In 1958 he was commissioned to paint murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York. He withdrew from the commission, and he later gave some of the dark red and black paintings to the Tate in London. His last major project was a chapel in Houston with fourteen dark paintings, the Rothko Chapel, which was dedicated in 1971.
Rothko's later paintings grew ever darker. He suffered from depression and ill health, and in 1970 he took his own life in his studio in New York. He is regarded as one of the foremost Abstract Expressionists and as the one who went furthest in letting colour alone carry emotion.