Mark Rothko

Biography

In 1964 Rothko moved into his last studio, on East 69th Street in New York, and the first thing he did was rebuild it. Under the central cupola he hung huge sheets of fabric on pulleys so that he could move them and regulate the light. In this way he rehearsed a space that did not yet exist: the chapel in Houston that the collectors John and Dominique de Menil had commissioned from him.

He never saw the chapel finished.

He was born on 12 (25) September 1903 in Dvinsk, in Vitebsk Governorate, the fourth child of a Jewish pharmacist, Yankel-Bendet Rothkowitz. At home the family spoke Yiddish and Russian, and at five the boy was sent to cheder. In 1910 his father, afraid that his sons would be taken into the army, left for Portland, Oregon, where his brothers already lived. Marcus, his mother and his sister sailed from Libau on 5 August 1913 aboard the steamer “Czar” and were in New York on 17 August. Seven months after they reached Portland, his father died. Marcus delivered orders and sold newspapers; at school he was moved up a grade, learned English (his fourth language) to perfection and graduated with honours. He went to meetings of the Industrial Workers of the World and seriously thought about the labour movement.

In 1921 he entered Yale University; in his first year he studied on a scholarship, then earned his keep with odd jobs, and with friends put out a satirical magazine aimed at the snobbery of the student elite. In 1923 he dropped out. Yale gave him an honorary doctorate only forty-six years later.

As an artist he was, in his own words, “born” in the autumn of 1923 in New York: he dropped in on a friend at an art school and saw the students drawing from a model. Then came lessons with George Bridgman at the Art Students League, classes with Arshile Gorky at the New School of Design and a few months with Max Weber, who strongly influenced his early work. From 1929 to 1952 he taught painting and modelling to children at the academy of the Brooklyn Jewish Center. In the early 1930s he grew close to Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman and their older friend Milton Avery; in summer they painted together at Lake George, where in 1932 Rothko met Edith Sachar, and he married her that same year. His first solo exhibition took place in the summer of 1933 at the Portland Art Museum, alongside drawings by his Brooklyn pupils. On 21 February 1938 he became an American citizen, and in 1940 he shortened his surname to Rothko.

Then for several years he was absorbed by myth. In 1940 he stopped painting altogether and read Frazer's “The Golden Bough”, Freud, and Nietzsche's “The Birth of Tragedy”; out of this came “Antigone”, “Oedipus”, “The Sacrifice of Iphigenia”. After an exhibition in 1942 he and Gottlieb answered a critic at The New York Times with a short manifesto in defence of the large image, flat forms and the simple expression of complex thought. In 1943 his first marriage broke up. In Berkeley he became friends with Clyfford Still; in 1945 he married Mary Ellen (Mell) Beistle and showed at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery.

From 1946 the subjects disappeared. First came the “multiforms”, blurred patches of different colours, and then, by 1949, his final formula: two or three soft-edged rectangles on a large vertical canvas. He thinned his oil paint heavily, laid thin layers on unprimed canvas and kept his recipes secret even from his assistants; later analysis found egg, glue and synthetic resins in the paint layer. Titles gave way to numbers. Rothko would not let anyone call him an abstractionist and said that he painted tragedy, ecstasy, doom. In 1949 he was deeply affected by Matisse's “The Red Studio”, which the Museum of Modern Art had just acquired, and in 1950, on his first trip to Europe, by Fra Angelico's frescoes in the monastery of San Marco. I would look at his late work with Fra Angelico in mind: there too the light seems to come from inside the wall.

In 1958 the Seagram company commissioned paintings from him for the Four Seasons restaurant in its new skyscraper on Park Avenue. Within a few months he painted some forty canvases in dark reds and browns, turning the format vertical to suit the columns and windows of the room. In the summer of 1959 he looked at the vestibule of Michelangelo's Laurentian Library in Florence and at the frescoes of the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii. On his return he went into the nearly finished restaurant, withdrew from the commission and gave back the advance. The canvases stayed with him until 1968 and are now divided between the Tate, the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in Japan and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

In 1961 the Museum of Modern Art gave him a retrospective. For Harvard he made a series of murals, hung in January 1963; the red pigment, lithol, faded in the light, and by 1979 they had been taken down. Work on the chapel went on from 1964: an octagon lit from above, triptychs modelled on Crucifixions, black rectangles. The architect Philip Johnson, who did not share Rothko's views on the light, left the project in 1967. His last paintings, the “Black on Gray” series, Rothko painted in acrylics and, on his doctors' advice, at a small size. From the first day of 1969 he lived apart from his wife, in the studio itself.

Rothko died in New York on 25 February 1970, the day the Seagram canvases were delivered to the Tate in London. The fourteen paintings of the Houston chapel were shown to the public at its consecration on 28 February 1971.