September 25: Mark Rothko

Painter Mark Rothko (Marcus Rothkowitz) was born in Russia (contemporary Latvia) on this date in 1903. He came to the U.S. at age 10 and acquired English as his fourth language. Rothko became a Yale drop-out and entered into painting through the tutelage of Arshile Gorky (at the New School) and Max Weber (at the Art Students League). His first one-man shows came in 1932; soon after, he was embedded in a community of Jewish expressionist artists (“The Ten”) who protested the Whitney Museum’s tendency to equate “American painting and literal painting.” Rothko was a WPA artist in the late 1930s. As the U.S. approached World War II, he became a U.S. citizen (for fear that foreign-born Jews in the U.S. might be deported into the hands of Nazism), changed his name from Rothkowitz to Rothko, and worked to keep his community of artists free of political “taint” by disassociating from leftist activity. By the late 1940s he was creating the rectangular fields-of-color paintings for which he became internationally famous. His success, however, seemed to evoke in him worsening depression, desire for seclusion, and protestations that his artwork was misunderstood or valued only for trendy reasons. He committed suicide in 1970 at age 66.

“I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.” —Mark Rothko