Mark Rothko was an American painter, born Markus Rothkowitz in 1903 in Dvinsk, in what is now Latvia. His family emigrated to Portland, Oregon in 1913. He studied at Yale, left without finishing, and moved to New York, where he painted figures and subway platforms before finding the work he is known for.
His paintings are large blocks of colour with soft edges, stacked and floating on a stained canvas. He wanted them hung low and lit dim. He wanted you standing close, about eighteen inches away, close enough that the colour stops being a picture and becomes somewhere you are.
He rejected the label of colourist. He said he was interested in tragedy, ecstasy and doom. People cried in front of his paintings, and he said they were having the same experience he had while painting them.
MARK ROTHKO.
Latvia · 1903 - 1970
In 1958 Rothko took the biggest commission of his career, a series of murals for the restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York. He built a scaffold in his studio to match the dimensions of the room so he could paint at its scale.
Rothko died in his New York studio in February 1970. He was sixty six. His executors sold the estate paintings to the Marlborough Gallery for a fraction of their value, his children sued, and they won. The market he spent his life distrusting came for the work almost immediately.
The colour drained out of the work as he went. The bright canvases turned to maroon, dark red and black. He called them more sombre than anything he had tried before. He had been thinking about Michelangelo's Laurentian Library, and said he wanted the feeling of being trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up.
In 1960, after more than two years of work and a studio full of finished paintings, he pulled out. He decided the restaurant was the wrong place for them. He gave nine canvases to Tate instead. They arrived in London on the day he died.
"This kind of design may look simple, but it usually takes me many hours to get the proportions and colours just right. Everything has to lock together. I guess I am pretty much a plumber at heart."
All works © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Seagram Murals: Tate. No. 61 and Untitled (Black and Gray): The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. No. 2: National Gallery of Art, Washington.