88 Facts About Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko, born Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz, was a Latvian-born American abstract painter.

Mark Rothko is best known for his color field paintings that depicted irregular and painterly rectangular regions of color, which he produced from 1949 to 1970.

Originally emigrating to Portland, Oregon, from Russia with his family, Mark Rothko later moved to New York City where his youthful period of artistic production dealt primarily with urban scenery.

Toward the end of the decade, Mark Rothko painted canvases with regions of pure color which he further abstracted into rectangular color forms, the idiom he would use for the rest of his life.

The Seagram murals were to have decorated the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building, but Mark Rothko eventually grew disgusted with the idea that his paintings would be decorative objects for wealthy diners and refunded the lucrative commission, donating the paintings to museums including the Tate Modern.

Mark Rothko contributed 14 canvases to a permanent installation at the Mark Rothko Chapel, a non-denominational chapel in Houston, Texas.

Mark Rothko's father, Jacob Rothkowitz, was a pharmacist and intellectual who initially provided his children with a secular and political, rather than religious, upbringing.

Mark Rothko started school in the United States in 1913, quickly accelerating from third to fifth grade.

Mark Rothko learned his fourth language, English, and became an active member of the Jewish community center, where he proved adept at political discussions.

Mark Rothko later enrolled in the Parsons The New School for Design, where one of his instructors was Arshile Gorky.

Under Weber's tutelage, Mark Rothko began to view art as a tool of emotional and religious expression.

Years later, when Weber attended a show of his former student's work and expressed his admiration, Mark Rothko was immensely pleased.

Mark Rothko's move to New York landed him in a fertile artistic atmosphere.

In 1928, with a group of other young artists, Mark Rothko exhibited works at the Opportunity Gallery.

Mark Rothko's paintings, including dark, moody, expressionist interiors and urban scenes, were generally well accepted among critics and peers.

Mark Rothko's family was unable to understand Rothko's decision to be an artist, especially considering the dire economic situation of the Depression.

Mark Rothko showed fifteen oil paintings, mostly portraits, along with some aquarelles and drawings.

In late 1935, Mark Rothko joined with Ilya Bolotowsky, Ben-Zion, Adolph Gottlieb, Louis Harris, Ralph Rosenborg, Louis Schanker and Joseph Solman to form "The Ten".

Mark Rothko was earning a growing reputation among his peers, particularly among the group that formed the Artists' Union.

In 1936, Mark Rothko began writing a book, never completed, about similarities between the art of children and the work of modern painters.

Mark Rothko's style was already evolving in the direction of his renowned later works.

On February 21,1938, Mark Rothko finally became a citizen of the United States, prompted by fears that the growing Nazi influence in Europe might provoke the sudden deportation of American Jews.

Mark Rothko sought subjects that would complement his growing interest in form, space, and color.

Mark Rothko insisted that the new subject matter have a social impact, yet be able to transcend the confines of current political symbols and values.

Mark Rothko later said that his artistic approach was "reformed" by his study of the "dramatic themes of myth".

Mark Rothko allegedly stopped painting altogether in 1940, to immerse himself in reading Sir James Frazer's study of mythology The Golden Bough, and Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams.

Mark Rothko considered himself a "mythmaker", and proclaimed that "the exhilarated tragic experience is for me the only source of art".

Mark Rothko evokes Judeo-Christian imagery in Gethsemane, The Last Supper, and Rites of Lilith.

In 1936, Mark Rothko attended two exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, "Cubism and Abstract Art", and "Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism".

Mark Rothko viewed myth as a replenishing resource for an era of spiritual void.

Mark Rothko met with noted collector and art dealer Peggy Guggenheim, but she was initially reluctant to take on his artworks.

Mark Rothko's one-person show at Guggenheim's The Art of This Century Gallery, in late 1945, resulted in few sales, with prices ranging from $150 to $750.

In 1946, Mark Rothko created what art critics have since termed his transitional "multiform" paintings.

Mark Rothko himself described these paintings as possessing a more organic structure, and as self-contained units of human expression.

Mark Rothko described his new method as "unknown adventures in an unknown space", free from "direct association with any particular, and the passion of organism".

In 1949, Mark Rothko became fascinated by Henri Matisse's Red Studio, acquired by the Museum of Modern Art that year.

Mark Rothko later credited it as another key source of inspiration for his later abstract paintings.

Soon, the "multiforms" developed into the signature style; by early 1949 Mark Rothko exhibited these new works at the Betty Parsons Gallery.

Mark Rothko invited only a select few, including Rosenberg, to view the new paintings.

Mark Rothko even went so far as to recommend that viewers position themselves as little as eighteen inches away from the canvas so that they might experience a sense of intimacy, as well as awe, a transcendence of the individual, and a sense of the unknown.

Mark Rothko's aims, in the estimation of some critics and viewers, exceeded his methods.

In later years, Mark Rothko emphasized more emphatically the spiritual aspect of his artwork, a sentiment that would culminate in the construction of the Mark Rothko Chapel.

Mark Rothko's method was to apply a thin layer of a binder mixed with pigment directly onto uncoated and untreated canvas and to paint significantly thinned oils directly onto this layer, creating a dense mixture of overlapping colors and shapes.

Mark Rothko's brushstrokes were fast and light, a method he would continue to use until his death.

Mark Rothko's increasing adeptness at this method is apparent in the paintings completed for the Chapel.

Mark Rothko used several original techniques that he tried to keep secret even from his assistants.

In 1968 Mark Rothko, in declining health, began painting most of his large works in acrylic paint instead of oils.

Mark Rothko had one-man shows at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950 and 1951 and at other galleries across the world, including in Japan, Sao Paulo, and Amsterdam.

When Fortune magazine named a Mark Rothko painting in 1955 as a good investment, Newman and Clyfford Still branded him a sell-out with bourgeois aspirations.

Still wrote to Mark Rothko to ask that the paintings he had given him over the years be returned.

Mark Rothko feared that people purchased his paintings simply out of fashion and that the true purpose of his work was not being grasped by collectors, critics, or audiences.

Mark Rothko wanted his paintings to move beyond abstraction, as well as beyond classical art.

Mark Rothko began to insist that he was not an abstractionist and that such a description was as inaccurate as labeling him a great colorist.

Whatever Mark Rothko's feeling about interpretations of his work, it is apparent that, by 1958, the spiritual expression he meant to portray on canvas was growing increasingly dark.

In November 1958, Mark Rothko gave an address to the Pratt Institute.

In 1958, Mark Rothko was awarded the first of two major mural commissions, which proved both rewarding and frustrating.

Mark Rothko agreed to provide paintings for the building's new luxury restaurant, the Four Seasons.

Mark Rothko altered his horizontal format to vertical, to complement the restaurant's vertical features: columns, walls, doors, and windows.

Mark Rothko hoped, he told Fischer, that his painting would make the restaurant's patrons "feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall".

Upset with the restaurant's dining atmosphere, which he considered pretentious and inappropriate for the display of his works, Mark Rothko refused to continue the project and returned his cash advance to the Seagram and Sons Company.

Mark Rothko was an Isaac who at the last moment refused to yield to Abraham.

Mark Rothko's first completed space was created in the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, following the purchase of four paintings by collector Duncan Phillips.

In January 1961, Rothko sat next to Joseph Kennedy at John F Kennedy's inaugural ball.

That autumn, Mark Rothko signed with the Marlborough Gallery for sales of his work outside the United States.

Mark Rothko received a second mural commission project, this time for a room of paintings for the penthouse of Harvard University's Holyoke Center.

Mark Rothko made twenty-two sketches, from which ten wall-sized paintings on canvas were painted, six were brought to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and only five were hung: a triptych on one wall and opposite two individual panels.

Mark Rothko's aim was to create an environment for a public place.

The Mark Rothko Chapel is located adjacent to the Menil Collection and The University of St Thomas in Houston, Texas.

In 1964, Mark Rothko moved into his last New York studio at 157 East 69th Street, equipping the studio with pulleys carrying large walls of canvas material to regulate light from a central cupola, to simulate the lighting he planned for the Mark Rothko Chapel.

Mark Rothko told friends he intended the chapel to be his single most important artistic statement.

Mark Rothko became considerably involved in the layout of the building, insisting that it feature a central cupola like that of his studio.

Mark Rothko's painting technique required considerable physical stamina that the ailing artist was no longer able to muster.

On half of the works, Mark Rothko applied none of the paint himself and was for the most part content to supervise the slow, arduous process.

Mark Rothko felt the completion of the paintings to be "torment", and the inevitable result was to create "something you don't want to look at".

Mark Rothko never saw the completed chapel, and never installed the paintings.

The drama for many critics of Mark Rothko's work is the uneasy position of the paintings between, as Chase notes, "nothingness or vapidity" and "dignified 'mute icons' offering 'the only kind of beauty we find acceptable today'".

In early 1968, Mark Rothko was diagnosed with a mild aortic aneurysm.

Meanwhile, Mark Rothko's marriage had become increasingly troubled, and his poor health and impotence resulting from the aneurysm compounded his feeling of estrangement in the relationship.

On February 25,1970, Oliver Steindecker, Mark Rothko's assistant, found the artist lying dead on the kitchen floor in front of the sink, covered in blood.

Mark Rothko had overdosed on barbiturates and cut an artery in his right arm with a razor blade.

Mark Rothko's suicide has been studied in the medical literature where his later paintings have been interpreted as "pictorial suicide notes" due to their somber palettes and especially in contrast with the brighter colors Mark Rothko employed more frequently during the 1950s.

Susan Grange observed that, following his aneurysm, Mark Rothko executed several smaller works on paper using lighter hues, which are less well-known.

In 1971, Mark Rothko's children filed a lawsuit against Reis, Morton Levine, and Theodore Stamos, the executors of his estate, over the sham sales.

Mark Rothko's estranged wife Mell, a heavy drinker, died six months after him at the age of 48.

Red, a play by John Logan based on Mark Rothko's life, opened at the Donmar Warehouse in London, on December 3,2009.

Art collector Richard Feigen said that he sold a red Mark Rothko painting to the National Gallery of Berlin for $22,000 in 1967.

In November 2003, an untitled red and brown Mark Rothko painting from 1963, measuring 69 by 64 inches, sold for US$7,175,000.

In May 2012, Mark Rothko's painting Orange, Red, Yellow was sold by Christie's in New York for $86,862,500, setting a new nominal value record for a postwar painting at a public auction and putting it on the list of most expensive paintings.