Consuelo Kanaga, Mark Rothko, Yorktown Heights, ca. 1949. Brooklyn Museum.
Mark Rothko was born Markus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk in 1903 and died in New York in 1970. He emigrated to the United States as a child, studied briefly at Yale, and then at the Art Students League. By the late 1940s he had set myth and figure aside for the stacked fields of color that define his mature painting.
Those canvases are not pictures of a feeling. Rothko spoke of them as places: large, quiet, and meant to be met at close range, so that color could act directly on the person standing before it. With Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, and others, he gave Abstract Expressionism its contemplative side — less a record of the gesture than a presence in the room. The Seagram commission, the Harvard murals, and the Rothko Chapel in Houston carried that ambition from the studio into architecture.
His importance is the scale of that claim. A Rothko asks to be experienced rather than read, and in doing so it remains one of the defining achievements of American painting in the twentieth century.
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