Rothko, Mark (redirected from Mark Rothko)

Rothko, Mark (rŏth`kō), 1903–70, American painter, b. Russia. Rothko emigrated to the United States in 1913. He was a student of Max Weber, then came under the influence of the surrealists. In the mid-1940s Rothko experimented with abstraction, arranging intense colors in irregular shapes. Soon he became a leading exponent of a uniquely meditative and personal strain within the larger movement of abstract expressionism. His later works (e.g., No. 10, 1950; Mus. of Modern Art, New York City) frequently consist of floating rectangles of luminous color on enormous canvases that manage to simultaneously convey a deep sensuality and a profound spirituality. Rothko's images to some degree presaged some of the techniques of the later color-field painting. He collaborated with the architect Philip Johnson on the design of a chapel in Houston in the mid-1960s. Rothko committed suicide.

Bibliography

See his The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art (2004), ed. by his son, Christopher Rothko; biography by J. E. B. Breslin (1993); D. Anfam, Mark Rothko: the Works on Canvas: Catalogue Raisonné (1998); P. Selz, Mark Rothko (1972); L. Seldes, The Legacy of Mark Rothko (1978, repr. 1996); D. Ashton, About Rothko (1983, repr. 1996); A. C. Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction (1989); M. Glimcher, ed., The Art of Mark Rothko (1991); D. Waldman, Mark Rothko in New York (1994); S. Nadelman, The Rothko Chapel Paintings (1996); L. Seldes, The Legacy of Mark Rothko (1996), J. S. Weiss et al., Mark Rothko (1998); K. Ottmann, The Essential Mark Rothko (2003).

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Rothko, Mark

 orig. Marcus Rothkowitz

(born Sept. 25, 1903, Dvinsk, Russia—died Feb. 25, 1970, New York, N.Y., U.S.) Russian-born U.S. painter. His family settled in Portland, Ore., in 1913, and he took up painting (largely self-taught) after moving to New York City in 1925. His early realistic style culminated in the Subway series (late 1930s). The semiabstract forms of his work in the early 1940s developed into a highly personal, contemplative form of Abstract Expressionism by 1948. Unlike many of his fellow Abstract Expressionists, Rothko never relied on such dramatic techniques as violent brush strokes or the dripping and splattering of paint. Instead, his virtually gestureless paintings achieved their effects by juxtaposing large areas of melting colours that seemingly float parallel to the picture plane in an indeterminate, atmospheric space. Rothko spent the rest of his life refining this basic style through continuous simplification. In 1965–66 he completed 14 immense canvases, whose sombre intensity reveals his deepening mysticism; they are now housed in a chapel in Houston, which was named the Rothko Chapel after his suicide.

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Rothko, Mark (b. Marcus Rothkovitch) (1903–70) painter; born in Daugavpils (Dinsk), Latvia. His immigrant parents settled in Portland, Ore. (1913). After two years at Yale he settled in New York City, and except for a brief time studying with Max Weber (1925), he became a self-taught painter. During the 1930s he moved through various styles—starting with traditional representational subjects, then mythological themes—and from 1935–37 he was employed by the Federal Arts Project. In the early 1940s he took an interest in surrealism, but by 1947 his works became increasingly more abstract and by 1950 he found his true style in so-called color-field paintings, works with large rectangles of color that express moods, as in Four Darks in Red (1958). In 1961 he had a one-man retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, an honor reserved for the giants of art. In 1970 he had two more major exhibits—at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art—but he committed suicide that year, shortly after he had completed what some regard as his masterwork, a group of murals for an interdenominational chapel in Houston, Texas.