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| 1936 Rothko with Pipe by Milton Avery drypoint on paper 18.3 x 17.2 cm Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
Mark Rothko was born Marcus
Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Russia in 1903. At the age of ten, Rothko and 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 Centre Academy of the Brooklyn Jewish Centre, a position he
retained for more than 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 emphasising the isolation of the riders.
From
the later 1930s to 1946 Rothko's oil and watercolour paintings reflected his
interest in Greek mythology, primitive art, and Christian tragedy. 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. He was given, in 1945, 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 non-objective
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. Now a recognised artist of the New York School, he was given, in 1954,
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.
He received his second commission for murals in 1961 for the Holyoke Centre at
Harvard University. From 1964 to 1967 Rothko worked on his third and last
commission, a Roman Catholic chapel in Houston, now interdenominational,
creating fourteen canvases, numerically corresponding to the Stations of the
Cross. From 1968 on, he worked in acrylic on canvas and paper, reducing his
palette to brown, grey, 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. Biographical notes from “Painting a Place in America:
Jewish Artists in New York 1900-1945” National Gallery of Art,
Washington, DC
This is part 1 of a 6 - part post on the works of Mark Rothko:
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| n.d. Seated Man Holding a Cigarette Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA© Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| n.d. Seated Woman Holding a Stringed Instrument Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA© Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| n.d. Untitled Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA© Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1933-34 Untitled (Three Nudes) National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1934-35 Untitled ( Man with Green Face ) oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1934-35 Untitled ( Woman with Sculpture ) oil on linen 35.5 x 60.9 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1934c Untitled ( Water Scene ) watercolour on paper 38.1 x 48.3 cm © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1936 Interior oil on hardboard 60.6 x 46.4 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1936 Rural Scene oil on canvas 68.5 x 96.8 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1936-37 Street Scene oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1937 Subway © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1937-38 Untitled ( Reclining Nude ) oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1937-38 Untitled oil on canvas 60.7 x 46.3 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1937c Street Scene oil on canvas 73.5 x 101.4 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1937c Untitled oil on canvas 101.6 x 76.2 cm Private Collection © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1938 Entrance to Subway oil on canvas 86.4 x 117.5 cm Private Collection © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1938 Untitled oil on canvas 127 x 94 cm Private Collection © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1939 Untitled oil on canvas 101.6 x 76.5 cm Private Collection © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1940 Underground Fantasy oil on canvas 87.3 x 118.2 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1940 Untitled watercolour and tempera 73.7 x 53.6 cm The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1940c Untitled ( Man and Two Women in a Pastoral Setting ) graphite and oil on canvas 72.4 x 91.4 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1941-42 Crucifix oil on canvas 68.6 x 63.8 cm Washburn Gallery, New York City © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1941-42 Heads oil on canvas 50.8 x 71.1 cm Washburn Gallery, New York City © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko-DACS 2016 |
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| 1941-42 In Limbo oil on canvas 81.3 x 61 cm © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1941-42 Untitled graphite and oil on linen 61 x 81 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1941-42 Untitled oil on canvas 76 x 91.3 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1941-42 Untitled oil on canvas 91 x 60.6 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1941c Antigone oil and charcoal on canvas 86.4 x 116.2 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1942 Sacrifice of Iphigenia oil on canvas127 x 93.7 cm Private Collection © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1942 Untitled oil on canvas 71.3 x 92 cm Guggenheim, New York City © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1942 Untitled oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1942 Untitled © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1943 No.7599 Untitled (1280) watercolour on paper 57.1 x 39.4 cm Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko-DACS 2016 |
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| 1944 Agitation of the Archaic oil on canvas 89.7 x 137.8 cm Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1944 Aubade gouache 64.1 x 48.3 cm The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1944 Gethsemane oil and charcoal on canvas 138.1 x 90.3 cm Private Collection © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1944 Gyrations on Four Planes oil on canvas Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1944 Hierarchical Birds oil on canvas 100.7 x 80.5 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1944 Primaeval Landscape oil on canvas 128 x 88.9 cm Private Collection © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1944 Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea oil on canvas 215.2 x 191.4 cm Museum of Modern Art, New York City © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1944 Untitled 2 © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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| 1944 Untitled 3 © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2016 |
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