Marcus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz was born in 1903 in Dvinsk, Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire), and emigrated with his family to Portland, Oregon, in 1913. After studying briefly at Yale and working through Surrealist-influenced figurative painting in the 1930s and 1940s, Rothko arrived in the late 1940s at the format that would define his mature work: large canvases presenting two or three soft-edged rectangles of colour floating on a coloured ground, their boundaries blurred, their surfaces luminous and breathing.
These paintings — which Rothko insisted were not about colour but about “basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom” — are among the most profound and affecting works of the twentieth century. Standing before a large Rothko — No. 61 (Rust and Blue), Orange, Red, Yellow, Black in Deep Red — one is enveloped by colour that seems to pulse and expand, creating an experience that many viewers describe as spiritual or transcendent. Rothko himself said he was “not interested in relationships of colour or form” but in “expressing basic human emotions,” and he was distressed when viewers responded to his paintings purely as beautiful objects.
The Rothko Chapel in Houston, completed in 1971, the year after his suicide, houses fourteen of his last paintings — enormous, nearly black canvases that represent the terminal point of his journey toward silence and darkness. Rothko took his own life in 1970, at sixty-six. His art remains a testament to the possibility that abstract painting can reach as deep into human experience as any figurative representation.