Mark Rothko

Who

Born Marcus Rothkowitz on 25 September 1903 in Dvinsk (now Daugavpils, Latvia), then part of the Russian Empire, he emigrated to the United States in 1913 and grew up in Portland, Oregon. A painter in New York, he died there by suicide on 25 February 1970, aged 66.

Why they matter

By 1950 he had reduced painting to a few soft-edged rectangles of colour stacked on a vertical canvas, and then spent twenty years proving how much that could carry. He did not want them read as colour exercises: "I am interested only in expressing basic human emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on." The paintings are made to be stood in front of, close, at a scale that fills the eye - which is why the rooms built around them, the Tate's Seagram room and the chapel in Houston, matter as much as any single canvas.

What to buy

Prints: honestly, a Rothko print is a compromise - the paintings work through size, thin layered glazes and edges that breathe, and a small print keeps only the layout. Buy the largest you have room for, from a source that works from the museum's own photography. Tate's shop makes custom prints of the Seagram murals it holds, printed to order in a choice of sizes and carrying the Rothko family copyright line on the border; that is the best-licensed option there is. Books: Taschen's Basic Art Rothko by Jacob Baal-Teshuva is the cheapest good introduction. His own book, The Artist's Reality, written around 1940-41 and edited by his son Christopher (Yale, 2004), is the one to read for what he thought he was doing. The standard reference is David Anfam's catalogue raisonne of the 836 works on canvas (Yale and the National Gallery of Art, 1998), long out of print; look for it second-hand. Originals: not realistic. The paintings are museum and record-auction pieces, and they have been faked at the highest level: between 1994 and 2011 New York's Knoedler gallery sold almost 40 forged Abstract Expressionist paintings, Rothkos among them, painted in a garage in Queens.

Notes

The largest public holding is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the main beneficiary when the Mark Rothko Foundation distributed its collection in 1986, and the NGA's free online catalogue raisonne of his works on paper is still being added to. Tate holds nine of the Seagram murals, four titled Red on Maroon and five Black on Maroon. The Harvard murals, installed in 1963, faded because of a fugitive red pigment and were taken down by 1979. His estate became the subject of a decade-long lawsuit brought by his daughter Kate; in 1975 the court found the executors liable and ordered Marlborough Gallery to return 658 unsold works.

Story

In 1958 Rothko accepted a commission to paint murals for the Four Seasons, the new restaurant in the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, and painted a series of about forty canvases in dark reds, maroons and browns - a studio visitor called them "darkly luminous". Then he changed his mind. He told the journalist John Fischer that he meant to paint something that would ruin the appetite of everyone who ate in that room, and in the end he decided the restaurant was no place for pictures meant to hold that much feeling. He returned the advance and kept the paintings.

For years they sat unhung. Rothko wanted them shown together, permanently, as a room, and he chose London: he admired Turner and hoped his paintings would hang near Turner's at the Tate. He gave Tate nine of them.

The paintings arrived in London on the morning of 25 February 1970. That same day, in New York, Rothko took his own life. He never saw them hang. Paintings conceived to sit above diners at a Park Avenue restaurant ended up where he wanted them: in a museum, kept together as a group, in the museum of the painter he admired.

Key works

No. 10 (1950) - MoMA, New York
Red on Maroon (Seagram mural) (1959) - Tate, London
Rothko Chapel (14 paintings) (opened 1971) - Rothko Chapel, Houston

Mark Rothko

Who

Why they matter

What to buy

Notes

Story

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

Prints

Books

See also