Mark Rothko - Artworks Collection ( HD 720 )

Mark Rothko is a key figure in Abstract Expressionism, best known for his large color field paintings like No.61 (Rust and Blue) (1953). Born Markus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Russian Empire (now Latvia) in 1903, Rothko and his family immigrated to the United States in 1913. He began his undergraduate studies at Yale University in 1921 but left two years later to move to New York. Rothko took classes at the Art Students League and was briefly a student of Jewish-American painter Max Weber, but he was mostly a self-taught painter. During his early years, he painted different scenes of the New York subway, like Entrance to the Subway (1938), that dealt with feelings of alienation in city life. Rothko also co-founded the art group The Ten in 1935, whose members included artists William de Kooning, Ilya Bolotowsky, William Baziotes, and Adolph Gottlieb. Members of The Ten rejected realist painting, which in its different forms dominated the American cultural landscape of the time.
Like other abstract expressionists, Rothko showed a profound interest in European Surrealism, particularly in the works of artists, Joan Miró and André Masson. Throughout the 1940s, Rothko created Surrealist images dominated by amorphous shapes; for example, Primeval Landscape (1945) and Tentacles of Memory (1946). Towards the end of the 1940s, Rothko began transitioning toward entirely abstract painting. His initial abstract paintings, collectively known as ‘Multiforms,’ were composites of colorful free form shapes. By 1950, Rothko had developed his mature abstract style: he reduced his abstractions to a few floating rectangles vertically aligned against a color background. Rothko created paintings like No.61 (Rust and Blue) intending to communicate the essence of the human condition. By focusing on the pure essence of color and structure, the artist wanted his color field paintings to generate symbolic and metaphysical meaning.
One of Rothko’s most famous works was commissioned in 1964 by art patrons, John and Dominique de Menil. The couple admired the spiritual character of Rothko’s paintings and tasked him with the decoration of a Catholic chapel in Houston. Besides, Rothko was given control over the design of the space, which led to several arguments between the artist and the architect, Philip Johnson. Eventually, Johnston was replaced with Howard Barnstone and his partner Eugene Aubry, who worked closely with Rothko to translate his vision into architectural terms. Rothko worked tirelessly on the commission, selecting fourteen paintings that were distributed symmetrically on the walls of the chapel. For the chapel’s apse, he created a monochrome triptych painting in which the two side panels were positioned lower than the central one. Half of the paintings had a black color field, while the rest mixed dark tones of blue, crimson, and maroon. The dark palette was not a surprising artistic choice: Rothko primarily painted in dark tones from the second half of the 1950s up until the end of his life. The atmosphere of the chapel was of silent darkness. In his dark paintings, Rothko tried to evoke a spiritual experience that went beyond the word of God.
Rothko committed suicide on February 25th, 1970. He failed to see the completion of the chapel in 1971, which was named The Rothko Chapel in his honor.