Mark Rothko Paintings

Mark Rothko was born September 25, 1903, and died February 25, 1970. Mark was a famous Latvian born American painter and print maker who was classified as an abstract expressionist, although he rejected this label. Rothko received a scholarship to Yale based on academic performance, but dropped out after two years because his scholarship ran out after one year.

Rothko's life as an artist began in 1923 when he found employment in the garment district and took up residence on the Upper West Side. It was while visiting a friend at the Art Students League of New York that he witnessed students sketching models. He was only 20 years old at the time and had taken some art classes in high school, with his initial experience far from an immediate calling.

Rothko enrolled in the New School of Design, where he was taught by artists such as Arshile Gorky and Max Weber. That fall he took courses at the Art Students league of New York taught by still life artist Max Weber. Due to Weber, Rothko began to start seeing are as a tool of emotion and religious expression.  During this time Rothko's paintings were dark, moody, expressionist interiors, as well as urban scenes, but they were generally accepted among critics and peers. Rothko struggled sticking to his new career during the great depression.

In the late 1920's he met modernist painter Milton Avery. Avery who used simplified and colorful depictions of domestic subjects had a profound influence on Rothko's early stage of development. Avery and Rothko began meeting weekly for life drawling sessions.

In 1929 Rothko began teaching children at the Center Academy of the Brooklyn Jewish center, which was a position that he held for more than 20 years. In the 1930's Rothko painted mostly street scenes and interiors with figures. Rothko rejected all modes of representation as he stressed an emotional approach to the subject, which was an approach that he admired most in childrens art.

In 1933 Rothko was given his first one person exhibition at the Museum of Art in Portland, Oregon, and also a few months later at the Contemporary Arts Gallery in New York. His exhibitions included landscapes, nudes, portraits, and city scenes.

By the end of 1934 Rothko participated in an exhibition at the Gallery Secession. Members of the Gallery Secession included Louid Harris, Adolph Gottlieb, Llya Bolotowsky, and Joseph Solman. A few months later all of these artists formed their own group called the Ten, which exhibited together eight times between 1935 and 1939. Rothko's paintings throughout the Ten's exhibits were expressionist style.

Rothko began to create a number of haunting images of the New York subway. These images had window portals, and walls that serve as structural and expressive devices of confinement. He showed the subway as a place containing a dramatic contrast of themes such as walls and railings that are represented as flat screens, while tracks recede sharply. Rothko's characters are remote ciphers that process a haunted air, as if existing solely to inhabit the border that separates real a fictional space. Rothko's street scenes and subway pictures have been compared to examples of Ashcan school and Depression era realist painting.

In 1940's Rothko's imagery became increasingly symbolic.  Rothko felt that new subjects has to be found. In 1947 Rothko began to largely abandon conventional titles resorting to numbers or colors in order to distinguish one work from another. His paintings began to take on rectangular shapes of odd colors and schemes.