Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk , Russia on September 25, 1903. In 1913 his family left Russia to settle in Portland , Oregon , where he attended public school and high school. He entered Yale University in 1921 and studied the liberal arts, but left in 1923 because he was not sufficiently interested in academic training. By 1925 Rothko had settled in New York and begun tentatively to draw from the model. For a brief time he painted in Max Weber's class at the Art Students League. Thereafter he painted by himself.

Mark Rothko exhibited for the first time in 1929 when Bernard Karfiol selected several paintings for an exhibition at the Opportunity Gallery. In the early 1930s his work was included in group shows at the Secession Gallery. The Contemporary Arts Gallery gave him his first one-man show in New York in 1933. In 1935 he was a co-founder of "The Ten," a group with expressionistic tendencies that held annual shows for almost a decade, principally at the Montross and Passedoit galleries. Mark Rothko worked on the W. P. A. Federal Arts Project in New York in 1936-37. In 1940 J. B. Neumann showed a number of his paintings at the Neumann-Willard Gallery. In 1945 Peggy Guggenheim showed a series of paintings with strong affinities with surrealism in an important one-man exhibition at her New York gallery, Art of This Century. He also exhibited with the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors for a number of years and he was represented in annual exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1945 to 1950. He joined the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1946 and his first show was an exhibition of watercolors. Thereafter he showed there annually until 1951. In 1947 his style had formulated into the characteristic rectangular shapes floating in space, by which he is known.

Mark Rothko has also had a teaching career: From 1929-1952 he taught children at the Center Academy, Brooklyn, New York; during the summers of 1947 and 1949 at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco; in 1948 co-founder and teacher at a school on East 8th Street, New York, "Subjects of the Artists"; from 1951-54 on the staff of the Art Department, Brooklyn College; 1955, visiting artist, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado; winter, 1956, visiting artist, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1950 Mark Rothko went to Europe, traveling in England , France and Italy , and in 1959 he revisited these countries as well as Holland and Belgium .

In 1958 he began a series of murals for a large private dining room on Park Avenue , New York . After eight months of work, when the paintings were completed, the artist decided they were not appropriate for the setting and therefore did not deliver the work. Some of these panels are being shown in this exhibition.

Mark Rothko's work is represented in the following public collections: The Baltimore Museum of Art; Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; San Francisco Museum of Art; University of Arizona, Tuscon; Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Phillips Collection, Washington, D. C.