Collection: Rothko, Mark

* 1903 - † 1970

biography

Mark Rothko, actually Markus Rothkowitsch (1903-1970), American painter of Russian-Latvian origin, important representative of Abstract Expressionism. Rothko came to the USA in 1913, studied at Yale from 1921 to 1923 and then at the Art Students League in New York (with Max Weber).
He had his first solo exhibition in New York in 1933. His early work in the 1930s, during which he briefly worked for the WPA Federal Arts Project, was characterized by critical social realism. Later, under the influence of Max Ernst's works, he integrated surrealistic stylistic elements and drew from the canon of forms of the art of primitive religions, as in Baptism Scene (1945, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York).
Rothko founded the artist community Subject of the Artists in New York in 1948 with William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman, who went on to represent one of the most important varieties of Abstract Expressionism. The large-format pictures created since then derive their effect from rectangles that blur at the edges in suggestively harmonious colors, which significantly influenced the development of colorfield painting. Examples include Number 10 (1950, Museum of Modern Art, New York), Four Darks in Red (1958, Whitney Museum of American Art) and Untitled (1962, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart).