Mark Rothko Wallpapers, Paintings, Prints, Art Pictures

Mark Rothko was one of the most highly-regarded painters to emerge from the New York art scene after the end of World War II. Born in Russian-controlled Latvia, he emigrated with his family to the United States, settling in Portland, Oregon in 1913. His academic success in high school led to a scholarship at Yale University, but he dropped out during his second year and moved to New York City in 1923. There he found his niche in a crowd of like-minded artists (sometimes called "the Ten") and he began painting. During his career he became less and less interested in representational art and more drawn to art as a transcendent experience. Between the mid-1920s and the end of the 1940s, Rothko's paintings evolved from distorted figures and pseudo-primitive figures to less distinct figures known as "multiforms," then finally to the large, rectangular fields of color for which he became famous. His work is considered an example of Abstract Expressionism, though Rothko eschewed such labels during his career. His most famous works are untitled or have unmemorable titles such as "Black, Maroons and White" (1958), "Four Red" (1957) and "No. 6 (Violet, Green and Red)." A key figure in modern 20th century painting, Rothko was an art world celebrity during his lifetime, and his reputation as a tortured artist was guaranteed for eternity when he slashed his own arms above the elbow and bled to death in 1970.

(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.

Mark Rothko was born on Sept. 25, 1903, in Gvinsk, Russia, and emigrated to the United States in 1913. He attended Yale University (1921-1923), and he began painting in 1925, when he studied with Max Weber at the Art Students League in New York. He later traveled extensively in Europe.

In 1935 Rothko cofounded "The Ten," an organization of expressionist artists in New York. During 1936 and 1937 he worked on the government's Federal Arts Project. In 1948 he joined Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, and William Baziotes in founding a New York art school called "Subjects of the Artist." For extensive periods throughout his career Rothko taught at colleges and universities, including the Center Academy in Brooklyn (1929-1952), the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (summers of 1947 and 1949), Brooklyn College (1951-1954), the University of Colorado (1955), and Tulane University (1956).

Rothko's first important one-man show in 1945 at the Art of This Century Gallery in New York City established him as a leading figure in postwar American painting. During the 1940s and 1950s he exhibited regularly. In 1958 his work was included in the Venice Biennale, and in 1961 the Museum of Modern Art in New York City held a retrospective exhibition. Among Rothko's special awards were his election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1968 and the honorary degree of doctor of fine arts from Yale University in 1969. Rothko committed suicide in New York on Feb. 25, 1970.

Like nearly all the advanced American painters who matured during the 1940s, Rothko's early work was founded on the tenets of both cubism and surrealism. This meant that his art leaned both toward the problems of formal abstraction and toward a more traditional notion of conceptualized subject matter. By the late 1940s, however, he gradually broke through to a style that rejected both cubism and surrealism, and his work became linked with the abstract expressionism of men like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Rothko's bestknown paintings of the 1950s and 1960s continued to be associated with this general style.

But Rothko's art reveals a distinct and personal interpretation of the abstract expressionist style. From his first emergence as a mature artist, he eschewed the gestural brushwork and the dense, painterly surfaces that became celebrated in the work of De Kooning, Franz Kline, and others. Instead, Rothko concentrated on expression through color alone, and to this end he radically simplified his imagery. In his best paintings, the imagery consists of two or three rectangles of color that float within an abstract space. Generally, the areas of color dissolve softly into one another, denying all traces of either hard or tactile edges. The softness is a function of the artist's delicate, feathery brushstrokes, and it results in an expanding pictorial space that seems to consist of pure color rather than colored objects. In many of Rothko's paintings his colors appear to generate their own magical or divine light.

The catalog of Rothko's Museum of Modern Art retrospective exhibition, Mark Rothko, by Peter Selz (1961) is especially rich with illustrations. Rothko's place within the abstract expressionist movement is presented in Barbara Rose, American Art since 1900 (1967).

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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