Rothko, Mark, 1903-1970

Mark Rothko
Born Marcus Rothkowitz, 25 September 1903 - Russia, died 25 February 1970 - New York, USA

Marcus Rothkowitz was born to Jewish parents in Czarist Russia on September 25, 1903 in Dvinsk. His father emigrated to America when he was ten.

Having decided to become an artist, he started out painting representational pictures in the Expressionist manner, rendering the drama of contemporary existence in a faceless metropolis. His art then grew freer, in Surrealist-influenced compositions that focus on mythic and biomorphic figures. Finally, in the years between 1949 and his suicide in 1970, he jettisoned representational art altogether and worked solely on the luminous fields – mostly in red and black - for which he became famous.

He spoke four languages- Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and English, and experienced many cultures which greatly enriched his art.

Dvinsk was a solidly working-class, largely Jewish town of about 100,000. In response to the massive growth in revolutionary ideas, the Czarist authorities bloodily repressed workers – especially Jews – and attacked demonstrations, jailed militants and carried out pogroms.

His father managed to emigrate with Marcus in 1913 where he was soon joined by his family, but died in 1914 in Portland. Portland at the time was the epicentre of revolutionary activity in the US at the time, and the area where the revolutionary syndicalist union the Industrial Workers of the World, was strongest.

Marcus, having grown up around radical workers' meetings, attended meetings of the IWW and with other anarchists like Bill Haywood and Emma Goldman, where he developed strong oratorical skills he would later use in defence of Surrealism. With the onset of the Russian Revolution, Rothko organised debates about it in an atmosphere of extreme repression and wished to become a union organiser.

Following the death of the Russian Revolution, the destruction of the Spanish Revolution by Communists and Fascists, and the rise of the Nazis, Rothko reflected:

"Later, sometime in the Twenties I guess, I lost all faith in the idea of progress and reform. So did all my friends. Perhaps we were disillusioned because everything seemed so frozen and hopeless during the Coolidge and Hoover era. But I am still an anarchist. What else?"1

He became a painter when he joined Yale university, and changed his name to the Westernised Mark Rothko in 1938.

In 1940 Rothko was among 15 artists who resigned from the American Artists’ Congress after the group had failed to denounce the USSR's invasion of Finland.2 . From the statement published in The New York Times, April 17, 1940 3 :

"The American Artists' Congress which was founded to oppose war and fascism and to advance the professional interests of artists, at its last membership meeting on April 4, endorsed the Russian invasion of Finland and implicitly defended Hitler's position by assigning the responsibility for the war to England and France. The congress has also revised its policy of boycotting Fascist and Nazi exhibitions (e.g. Venice and Berlin 1936). It has failed to react to the Moscow meeting of Soviet and Nazi art officials and official artists, which inaugurated the new esthetic policy of cementing totalitarian relations through exchange exhibitions... The congress no longer deserves the support of free artists."

In 1958 he began a commission for the Seagram’s building and the luxury restaurant The Four Seasons. He set out with the goal of painting:

“something that will ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room. If the restaurant would refuse to put up my murals, that would be the ultimate compliment. But they won’t. People can stand anything these days.”

The project fell through after Rothko and his wife ate at The Four Seasons restaurant. Breaching contract, he returned the advance and kept the paintings.4

After building up a considerable body of work, he slit his wrists in 1970, after suffering extreme depression and many years of alcohol abuse.

An archive of Rothko's work is available online at artchive.com here:
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/R/rothko.html#images

• 1Quoted in John Fischer, The Easy Chair: Mark Rothko, Portrait of the Artist as an Angry Man, 1970.
• 2https://www.artnews.com/feature/mark-rothkos-protests-controversies-1234571770/
• 3as quoted in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art
• 4https://web.archive.org/web/20121119065826/https://www.gonzotimes.com/2012/09/mark-rothko-the-artist-the-anarchist/