Mark Rothko (1903-1970), Russian-born American painter, known for abstract paintings in which soft-edged rectangles of color seem to float weightlessly against undefined backgrounds. A major figure in the abstract expressionism movement, Rothko used color to convey a range of emotion and what the artist described as a religious experience.

Rothko was born Marcus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Russia (now Daugavpils, Latvia), and emigrated to the United States in 1913. He attended Yale University from 1921 to 1923, then left to settle in New York City. During the next five years he occasionally attended classes at the Art Students League, most notably with American painter Max Weber, but he was essentially self-taught. In New York he visited museums and the studios of artists such as Milton Avery, whose interest in simplified forms and large areas of flat, unvaried color would exercise a profound influence on him. Rothko also befriended painter Adolph Gottlieb, with whom he shared a passion for non-Western art, and later, an interest in lyrical abstraction.

Rothko’s work of the 1930s, like that of many of his contemporaries, reflected the strains of life during the Great Depression. In Subway (Subterranean Fantasy) (1936, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), figures stand on a subway platform, isolated both from each other and from the world above them. The elongation of the figures and the dark color scheme are attempts to evoke a sense of claustrophobia and alienation from the spectator.

Rothko also took cues from the European surrealism movement, which saw artistic creativity as a key to unlocking the unconscious. Slow Swirl by the Edge of the Sea (1944, Museum of Modern Art, New York) reflects his exposure to this movement. The painting uses a more abstract visual vocabulary than his earlier works, its forms are more curvilinear and organic, and color has begun to play a larger role. In this painting, Rothko meditated on the origins of life: how it emerged from the sea and how its origins could function as a metaphor for the origins of consciousness.

By the early 1940s Rothko had become interested in ancient myths and symbols and was profoundly affected by the theory of the collective unconscious put forth by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Jung proposed that all human beings, regardless of geographic origin or time period, shared a common mental organization, which manifests itself in folk tales, myths, and symbols. Rothko saw his paintings as vehicles for communicating a shared repertory of images that are reflective of this collective unconscious.

In addition, Rothko was significantly influenced by French painter Henri Matisse, whose works sacrificed line in favor of color and were in many cases limited to two or three colors. Rothko pushed Matisse's innovations to the level of complete abstraction. By 1949 Rothko had developed his signature style: large rectangular areas of color placed above one another atop a stained background, as in Green and Tangerine on Red (1956, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.). With these works he became a major figure in abstract expressionism. In the 1960s Rothko received several major mural commissions, among these a series for a nondenominational chapel in Houston, Texas (1964-1966), which he painted in somber shades of violet, maroon, and black. The building was rededicated as the Rothko Chapel after the artist’s death by suicide in 1970.

Although celebrated as a keen investigator of color, Rothko strongly objected to being called a colorist. He told critic Selden Rodman that he was interested only in expressing “basic human emotions—ecstasy, tragedy, doom,” and that to see his work only in terms of color relationships “missed the point.” Despite these disclaimers, it was his interest in color and simplified form that proved extremely influential to later painters including Ellsworth Kelly and Jack Youngerman. Their minimalist works took Rothko’s simplification of color and form to an even greater extreme.