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Mark
Rothko/Works and
biography
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Sacrifice
April 1946 |
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Mark Rothko was born Marcus Rothkowitz on September
25, 1903, in Dvinsk, Russia. In 1913, he left Russia
and settled with the rest of his family in Portland,
Oregon. Rothko attended Yale University, New Haven,
on a scholarship from 1921 to 1923. That year, he left
Yale without receiving a degree and moved to New York.
In 1925, he studied under Max Weber at the Art Students
League. He participated in his first group exhibition
at the Opportunity Galleries, New York, in 1928. During
the early 1930s, Rothko became a close friend of Milton
Avery and Adolph Gottlieb. His first solo show took
place at the Portland Art Museum in 1933.
Rothko’s first solo exhibition in New York was
held at the Contemporary Arts Gallery in 1933. In 1935,
he was a founding member of the Ten, a group of artists
sympathetic to abstraction and Expressionism. He executed
easel paintings for the WPA Federal Art Project from
1936 to 1937. By 1936, Rothko knew Barnett Newman. In
the early 1940s, he worked closely with Gottlieb, developing
a painting style with mythological content, simple flat
shapes, and imagery inspired by primitive art. By mid-decade,
his work incorporated Surrealist techniques and images.
Peggy Guggenheim gave Rothko a solo show at Art of This
Century in New York in 1945.
In 1947 and 1949, Rothko taught at the California School
of Fine Arts, San Francisco, where Clyfford Still was
a fellow instructor. With William Baziotes, David Hare,
and Robert Motherwell, Rothko founded the short-lived
Subjects of the Artist school in New York in 1948. The
late 1940s and early 1950s saw the emergence of Rothko’s
mature style, in which frontal, luminous rectangles
seem to hover on the canvas surface. In 1958, the artist
began his first commission, monumental paintings for
the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York. The Museum
of Modern Art, New York, gave Rothko an important solo
exhibition in 1961. He completed murals for Harvard
University in 1962 and in 1964 accepted a commission,
from John and Dominique de Menil, to paint some monumental
works for a chapel in Houston. Rothko took his own life
February 25, 1970, in his New York studio. A year later,
the Rothko Chapel in Houston was dedicated.
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