Mark Rothko Overview

The spiritual, the sublime, infinity itself: all seem to hover beneath the translucent surfaces of Mark Rothko's blurred and veil-like rectangles. The brilliantly colored blocks of his best-known works, distillations of all that this Lithuanian-born immigrant had learned during his first... [more]

The spiritual, the sublime, infinity itself: all seem to hover beneath the translucent surfaces of Mark Rothko's blurred and veil-like rectangles. The brilliantly colored blocks of his best-known works, distillations of all that this Lithuanian-born immigrant had learned during his first 15 years of painting, evoke both a soothing transcendence and a terrifying void. They manifest a sense of space particular to Rothko's upbringing in Oregon, where as a child he surveyed from on high an expansive countryside that seemed to subsume his own existence. Many of his extensive variations on these mystical forms are rendered in eye-popping hues, yet Rothko took offense to the appellation 'brilliant colorist.' Indeed, his later works -- created under the melancholy light of a shrouded studio that he found ideal for his purposes -- grew darker and darker, echoing an emotional decline that culminated in suicide. His mature paintings have become some of the most recognizable examples of Abstract Expressionism. Despite his friendships with both Motherwell and Newman, however, Rothko did not embrace that categorization. His paintings, though created with a Formalism that was his age's most exalted visual language, reach past the mind and toward the soul -- images, perhaps, of the invisible God whom his Judaism forbade he depict. [show less]