Mark Rothko Gallery

Rothko Mark Painting

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Rothko Mark Painting

Mark Rothko is an American artist of the mid-twentieth century. He is associated with the Abstract Expressionist art movement, specifically, color field painting.

Rothko’s well-known paintings are characterized by large rectangular shapes of color used to convey deep emotion. His career spanned five decades. Rothko and his paintings are credited as crucial to the development of the non-representational art movement. 

American Artist Rothko Mark Painting
American Artist Rothko Mark Painting
via: worthpoint.com

Mark Rothko (1903-1970) was born in Latvia. His parents emigrated to the US in 1910. He was raised an Orthodox Jew, but later distanced himself from the synagogue.

In his work he wanted to convey the ‘human drama’ or the tragedy of human existence. To this end he based himself on old Greek myths, but also used Christian symbolism of life and death in works like Baptismal Scene (1945), Gethsemane(1945) and Entombment (ca. 1946).

Rothko moved through many artistic styles until reaching his signature 1950s abstract expressionistic style of soft, rectangular forms floating on stained fields of colour. Heavily influenced by mythology and philosophy, he was insistent that his art was filled with content and brimming with ideas.

A fierce champion of social revolutionary thought and the right to self-expression, Rothko also expounded his views in numerous essays and critical reviews.


Rothko began transitioning from his more surrealist-style paintings into his more abstract signature “multiform” style in 1947. That same year would also be his most productive, yielding 43 paintings, more than double his annual average production. As with most artists in our database, his leanest years came at the very beginning and very end of his career, producing just two or three works per year in those years.

source: artnome.com


Mark Rothko (/ˈrɒθkoʊ/), born Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz (Russian: Ма́ркус Я́ковлевич Ротко́вич, Latvian: Markuss Rotkovičs; name not Anglicized until 1940; September 25, 1903 – February 25, 1970), was an American abstract painter of Latvian Jewish descent. He is best known for his color field paintings that depicted irregular and painterly rectangular regions of color, which he produced from 1949 to 1970.

Although Rothko did not personally subscribe to any one school, he is associated with the American Abstract Expressionist movement of modern art. Originally emigrating to Portland, Oregon from Russia with his family, Rothko later moved to New York City where his youthful period of artistic production dealt primarily with urban scenery. In response to World War II, Rothko’s art entered a transitional phase during the 1940s, where he experimented with mythological themes and Surrealism to express tragedy. Toward the end of the decade Rothko painted canvases with regions of pure color which he further abstracted into rectangular color forms, the idiom he would use for the rest of his life.

 

In his later career, Rothko executed several canvases for three different mural projects. The Seagram murals were to have decorated the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building, but Rothko eventually grew disgusted with the idea that his paintings would be decorative objects for wealthy diners and refunded the lucrative commission, donating the paintings to museums including the Tate Modern. The Harvard Mural series was gifted to a dining room in Harvard’s Holyoke Center (now Smith Campus Center); their colors faded badly over time due to Rothko’s use of the pigment Lithol Red together with regular sunlight exposure. The Harvard series has since been restored using a special lighting technique. Rothko contributed 14 canvases to a permanent installation at the Rothko Chapel, a non-denominational chapel in Houston, Texas.

Although Rothko lived modestly for much of his life, the resale value of his paintings grew tremendously in the decades following his suicide in 1970.

Wikipedia

Mark Rothko – Identification & Value

Mark Rothko’s early work is very different than the paintings for which he is most known. He painted in a realistic style, often using figurative imagery. Some of his figurative works were portraits and nudes. He also created landscapes and city scenes. This style culminated in the 1930s with his “Subway Series” of paintings. These paintings featured groups of people seemingly lonely in subway settings.

Rothko’s work simplified as his artistic career continued. In the 1940’s he began painting semi-abstracted pieces. By the late 1940s, the work had become non-representational color field paintings. The color field is defined as having “significant open space and expressive use of color.”

Mark Rothko’s work is based on the formal elements of art, most notably are color, shape, composition, and scale. Rothko’s early exploration of color and emotion used bright colors and large canvases. However, the colors became darker further along in his career. Rothko’s pieces are composed of rectangular shapes of color painted over colored grounds. Color is Rothko’s only means of expression in his work since he painted in thin glazes rather than expressive brushstrokes like fellow Abstract Expressionists.

Rothko’s paintings are usually comprised of 2-4 rectangular shapes of color over a background. There is a very shallow depth of space in the work, and color is the focus. Beyond color, scale is the other notable characteristic. His pieces tend to be very large. Some are even wall-sized. Some of his drawings on paper are smaller in scale, but those increased in size too as his career progressed.

Mark Rothko worked in watercolor, ink, gouache, and graphite. He also created lithographs. His most used medium was oil on canvas or paper. He switched to acrylic paint later in life due to his health problems. He preferred to leave his paintings unframed.

via: worthpoint.com