Mark Rothko

Born Marcus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Russia, on 25 September 1903, Rothko arrived in Portland, Oregon, in 1913. From 1921 to 1923, he attended Yale University, but left before receiving a degree. In 1925 Rothko settled permanently in New York, where he studied painting at the Art Students League with the American modernist Max Weber. From then until the late 1930s, Rothko's nudes, figures, and cityscapes absorbed a wide range of influences, including the work of Weber and Milton Avery, with whom Rothko exhibited in a group show in 1928. Throughout the 1930s, Rothko participated in a number of artists' groups that aimed to merge progressive, social action with artistic innovation.8 It was not until the Surrealist-inspired works of the late 1930s to the early '40s that a set of formal and thematic concerns became consistently manifest in Rothko's painting. During this period, Rothko's interests in Surrealism, the unconscious, myth, and tragedy, were shared by a number of young artists, who frequently discussed and defended their works in various public fora; they were later referred to as the New York School of painting. After World War II, Rothko developed the large, color-field paintings that became his signature style. These canvases are divided into rectilinear registers, each articulated by a thin field of unevenly applied pigment; they are admired for their powerful visual address and subtle, apparently psychological modulations. The painter completed several monumental mural projects in the later decades of his life. In the spring of 1967, Rothko suffered an aneurysm of the aorta. He died by his own hand on 25 February 1970 in New York City.