Mark Rothko "The Abstract Expressionist"
Rothko's Background Mark Rothko was
a Jew and was born as Marcus Rothkowitz in Dvnisk, Russia (today Daugavpils,
Latvia) on September 25, 1903. He was the fourth child of Jacob and Anna Goldin
Rothkowitz. Rothko and his family had immigrated to the United States when he
was ten years old, and had settled in Portland, Oregon. As a young boy he was
forced to learn English and go to work, resulting in a lingering sense of
bitterness over his lost childhood.
He had graduated
from Lincoln High School and was awarded a scholarship to Yale University.
Rothko attended Yale University in 1921, wanting to initially become an
engineer or an attorney. However he found the environment at Yale conservative
and exclusionary, and left without graduating in 1923. After leaving Yale,
Rothko made his way to New York City and attended classes at the Art Students
League, studying under Max Weber, who had encouraged him to work in a
figurative style reminiscent of Cezanne.
His early
paintings were oriented to social themes and contained expressionist as well as
surrealist overtones. By the mid-1930s, Rothko became increasingly concerned
with the social and political implications of mass unemployment. He began to
create paintings that were influenced by his acquaintance with the American
artist, Milton Avery, who became a mentor to him, and a group of young artists.
They exposed Rothko to new approaches to color and form, and his work began to
feature simplified compositions and flat areas of color.
In 1935, Rothko
and one of his partners, Adolph Gottlieb, founded ‘The Ten’, a group of artists
that favored expressionist styles over the more abstract techniques of the
Americans. By the late 1930s, Rothko and Gottlieb had developed a method of
painting that incorporated mythic symbols and archetypal figures drawn from
Surrealism. In 1939, he stopped painting altogether to read mythology and philosophy.
He came to see mankind as locked in a mythic struggle with free will and
nature, and became fascinated with the articulation of interior expression.
Around 1947,
Rothko began to develop his mature and distinctive style, turning to complete
abstraction. His paintings featured large rectangles of color in vertical
juxtaposition, which became symmetrical in presentation by 1950. His color
contrasts were carefully chosen in order to convey a wide range of human
emotions from foreboding and despair to hope and rapture. Rothko's work is
characterized by rigorous attention to formal elements such as color, shape,
balance, depth, composition, and scale.
Rothko
maintained the social revolutionary ideas of his youth throughout his life. In
fact, he supported artist’s total freedom of expression, which he felt was
compromised by the art market. Rothko’s life was shadowed by his severe
depression, and likely an undiagnosed bipolar disorder. Over-work, over-eating,
and over-indulgence in alcohol and barbiturates however, saw Rothko's health
fail in the later years of the 1960s. Sick and depressed, Rothko committed
suicide on February 25, 1970, at the age of 66. In the last act in his
"tragedy" he died on the floor of his studio. Painting consumed Rothko’s
life and although he didn’t receive the attention he felt his work deserved in
his own lifetime, his fame dramatically increased in the years after his death. |
