Biography: Mark Rothko

A central figure in the development of postwar painting in the United States, Mark Rothko is best known for the hypnotic and poignant fields of color that characterized his work from the late 1940s onward, paintings on both canvas and paper that are among the landmarks of abstract expressionism.

Rothko was born in Dvinsk (now Daugavpils), Latvia, and immigrated to the United States with his family, settling in Portland, Oregon, in 1913. After two years in the liberal arts program at Yale University, he moved to New York City in 1923 and studied briefly at the Art Students League. Important to the early years of Rothko's career was his friendship with painter Milton Avery (1885-1965), whom the young artist met in 1927 and who had a profound impact on his artistic methods and use of color. Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974) visited Avery's studio almost daily in the late 1920s and early 1930s, often drawing side-by-side from live models. During these years Rothko pursued a variety of additional motifs as well: images of family and friends and the places that were part of his daily life, interior settings, urban cityscapes, and landscapes and seascapes viewed during a cross-country trip in 1933 as well as vacations along the Massachusetts coastline.

In the 1940s symbolist and surrealist overtones marked Rothko's investigations of the mythic themes that also were being explored during World War II by other abstract painters including Gottlieb and Barnett Newman. Water-based paints became increasingly important to Rothko, as he moved from the relatively small sheets of paper that sufficed for the figurative images of previous decades to monumental sheets more in keeping with his abstract compositions. Using large soft-bristled brushes, Rothko applied paint--watercolor, gouache, tempera--to high-quality watercolor paper; before the paint dried, he would define forms and create automatist lines with black ink. He also began using oil paint as if it were watercolor, thinly applied in overlapping glazes that began to approach the shimmering chromatic fields of color that are most frequently associated with his art.

From the start of the 1950s large canvases dominated Rothko's production and remained dominant throughout the following two decades, although he continued to make works on paper as well. After suffering an aneurysm in 1968, however, too weak to tackle large canvases, Rothko turned almost exclusively to painting on paper until his death in 1970 at the age of 66.

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