Again Rothko

1903 Marcus Rothkowitz was born in Daugavpils, Lituania.

Associated with the Abstract Expressionism, Rothko always expresses his rejection of his label as an abstract painter as alienating.

1925 began his career as a painter in New York.

1940 made a painting very similar to the work of Barnett Newman and Adolph Gottlieb, close to surrealism and full of biomorphic forms.

1947 his style changes and he begins to paint large pictures with thin layers of color.

As the years go by, most of his compositions take the form of two confronting rectangles with edges blurred by glazes.

Large formats that surround the viewer are frequent, in order to make them participate in a mystical experience, since Rothko gave a religious sense to his painting.

At the end of his life his paintings are dark, with an abundance of browns, violets, garnets and, above all, black.

The Ménil family chapel in Houston, a prayer space where fourteen paintings cover an octagonal space, corresponds to this time.

At the age of five, his father enrolled him in the Jeder, the only one of the brothers, where he studied the Talmud.

This religious background has an undesirable effect on him that stigmatizes him by making him feel like an outsider in his own family.

His other siblings are educated in public and secular schools.

His childhood is full of fears, apparently he was able to witness violent acts by the Cossacks against the Jews.

The Cossacks took the Jews from the village into the woods, and made them dig a mass grave… I imagined that square grave so clearly. that I was not sure if the massacre had actually occurred during my existence. I was always tormented by the image of that tomb, and that in some deep way it was enclosed in my pictorial work.

From this manifesto, some critics have deduced that Rothko’s rectangular works are in some way allegorical to those tombs.

Although these deductions have been questioned, since at that time, there were no mass executions in Daugavpils or its vicinity.

1913 he emigrated with his mother to the United States, fleeing the Cossack purges, settling in Portland, Oregon as clothing manufacturers.

Their father had preceded them in 1910.

During his basic education, he did not take art classes formally, but did sketches and drawings.

1923 entered Yale University on a scholarship, but dropped out of school before graduating.

He moved to New York, the city where he had his first encounter with art at the Art Students League of New York, describing his experience himself:

Then one day it turned out that I attended an art class, with the purpose of meeting a friend who was attending the course.

All the students were doing a sketch of a nude model, and at that moment I decided that this was the life for me.

1925 he began his artistic training at the New School of Design, in which he was taught by Arshile Gorky, who was a member of the avant-garde movement.

Black on Maroon 1958 Mark Rothko 1903-1970 Presented by the artist through the American Federation of Arts 1968 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T01031

In the fall of that same year, he attended classes at the Art Students League in New York, taught by Max Weber, also of Russian origin.

Through this, Rothko, began to visualize art as a tool for emotional and religious expression, consequently his paintings from this period demonstrate the influence of Weber.