Mark
Rothko
Mark Rothko, one of the greatest painters of the
twentieth century, was born in Daugavpils, Latvia in 1903. His father emigrated
to the United States, afraid that his sons would be drafted into the Czarist
army. Mark stayed in Russia with his mother and older sister; they joined the
family later, arriving in the winter of 1913, after a 12-day voyage.
Mark moved to New York in the autumn of 1923 and found employment in the
garment trade and took up residence on the Upper West Side. It was while he was
visiting someone at the Art Students League that he saw students sketching a
nude model. According to him, this was the start of his life as an artist. He
was twenty years old and had taken some art lessons at school, so his initial
experience was far from an immediate calling.
In 1936, Mark
Rothko began writing a book, which he never completed, about the similarities in
the children’s art and the work of modern painters. The work of modernists,
which was influenced by primitive art, could, according to him, be compared to
that of children in that "child art transforms itself into primitivism, which is
only the child producing a mimicry of himself." In this same work, he said that
"the fact that one usually begins with drawing is already academic. We start
with colour.
It was not long before his multiforms developed
into the style he is remembered for; in 1949 Rothko exhibited these new works at
the Betty Parsons Gallery. For critic Harold Rosenberg, the paintings were a
revelation. Rothk0 had, after painting his first multiform, secluded himself to
his home in East Hampton on Long Island, only inviting a very few people,
including Rosenberg, to view the new paintings. The discovery of his definitive
form came at a period of great grief; his mother Kate died in October 1948 and
it was at some point during that winter that Rothko chanced upon the striking
symmetrical rectangular blocks of two to three opposing or contrasting, yet
complementary colours. As part of this new uniformity of artistic vision, his
paintings and drawings no longer had individual titles; from this point on they
were simply untitled, numbered or dated; however, to assist in distinguishing
one work from one another, dealers would sometimes add the primary colours to
the name. Additionally, for the next few years, Rothko painted in oil only on
large vertical canvasses. This was done to overwhelm the viewer, or, in his
words, to make the viewer feel enveloped within the picture.
On
February 25, 1970, Oliver Steindecker, Rothko’s assistant, found him in his
kitchen, lying on the floor in front of the sink, covered in blood. HIS arms had
been cut open with a razor. The emergency doctor arrived on the scene minutes
later to pronounce him dead as the result of suicide; it was discovered during
the autopsy that he had also overdosed on anti-depressants. He was just 66 years
old. |
