Mark Rothko "Untitled (violet, Black, Orange)"
This Artprint is:
***FRAMING ALONE is worth over $350 ***
MARK ROTHKO BIOGRAPHY
American, born Russia (now
Latvia). 1903–1970
Mark Rothko sought to make paintings that would bring people to tears. “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on,” he declared. “And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions… if you…are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point. Rothko painted to plumb the depths of himself and the human condition. For him, art was a profound form of communication, and art making was a moral act.
Born Markus Rothkowitz in Latvia in 1903, Rothko immigrated to the
United States with his family in 1913. In 1921, he entered Yale University,
leaving two years later. Like his peers, he found his direction and his place
in New York. It was there, in 1925, that he began to study at Parsons School of
Design under painter Arshile Gorsky, who powerfully influenced him and many
other Abstract Expressionists. Gorky and Rothko shared an interest in European
Surrealism as evidenced by the biomorphic forms populating their paintings from
the early 1940s. For Rothko, these forms would ultimately give way to the
floating zones of color over colored grounds for which he would become known.
Rothko first developed this composition strategy in 1947.
Described as “Color Field painting” by critic Clement Greenberg in 1955—a term
that stuck—it is a style characterized by significant open space and an
expressive use of color. Rothko was one of its pioneers. “His colored
rectangles seemed to dematerialize into pure light….” wrote MoMA’s former chief
curator of painting and sculpture William S. Rubin. Rothko spent the rest of
his career exploring the limitless possibilities of layering variously sized
and colored rectangles onto fields of color.
By 1968, Rothko’s health was in decline from years of severe
anxiety and his related drinking and smoking habits. After surviving an aneurysm, he continued to smoke and drink despite his doctor’s orders, but he
did scale back the size of his canvases and switch from oils to acrylic paints
to reduce the strain that his painting process placed on his body. In 1970, at
66 years old, the chronically depressed artist committed suicide, leaving
behind a body of work that brought him both critical and commercial success
during his lifetime.