Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko Mark Rothko is one of the important figures in the generation of painters. His work still draws attention to many people around the world. Born in Dvinsk, Russia (in what is now Latvia), Marcus Rothkovich was the fourth child of Jacob Rothkovich, a well to do pharmacist and his wife Anna Rothkovich. As Russia was a hostile environment for Zionist Jews, Jacob immigrated to the United States with his two older sons in 1910, finally sending for the rest of his family in 1913. They settled in Portland, Oregon. Mark graduated early from Lincoln high school, showing more interest in music, than visual art. He was awarded a scholarship at Yale university but soon found the environment at Yale conservative and exclusionary; he left without graduating in 1923. His first encounter with art was when he visited a friend who was in art class. He saw a picture of a nude model and drew his attention. He moved to New York City where he enrolled in max Weber’s still life and figure drawing classes at the art student’s league, which constituted his only artistic training. He stated that his style changes were motivated by the growing clarification of his content.” The progression of the painter’s work, as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity.” He continues saying that “a painter does not paint for students or historians but for human beings, and the reaction of the human terms is the only thing that is really satisfactory to the artist.”(Breslin186) Rothko’s works saw many abrupt and clearly defined stylistic shifts on subject matter from figurative, landscape, and street scenes to myth and religion, and to multiform which consist of his warm color and dark colors. Rothko’s early works included landscapes of the areas around Portland hills; Rothko produced a number of water colors. Representing the natural landscape around Portland, Untitled work( color plate 4), in which Rothko adopts a vantage point in