Famous Paintings of Mark Rothko An American Painter – Morphing Mark’s Artwork
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Mark Rothko (Russian: Marcus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz; September 25, 1903 — February 25, 1970) was an American painter of Latvian Jewish descent. He is generally identified as an Abstract Expressionist, although he himself rejected this label and even resisted classification as an “abstract painter.” With Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, he is one of the most famous postwar American artists.

In the autumn of 1923, Rothko found work in New York’s garment district. While visiting a friend at the Art Students League of New York, he saw students sketching a model. According to Rothko, this was the beginning of his life as an artist. He later enrolled in the New York School of Design, where one of his instructors was the artist and class monitor Arshile Gorky. This was probably his first encounter with a member of the American avant-garde, though the two men never became close, given Gorky’s dominating nature. (Rothko referred to Gorky’s leadership in the class as “overcharged with supervision.”)

In 1936, Rothko began writing a book, never completed, about similarities in the art of children and the work of modern painters. According to Rothko, the work of modernists, influenced by primitive art, could be compared to that of children in that “child art transforms itself into primitivism, which is only the child producing a mimicry of himself.” In this manuscript, he observed that “the fact that one usually begins with drawing is already academic. We start with color.” Rothko was using fields of color in his aquarelles and city scenes.

Fearing that modern American painting had reached a conceptual dead end, Rothko was intent upon exploring subjects other than urban and nature scenes. He sought subjects that would complement his growing concern with form, space, and color. The world crisis of war lent this search an immediacy because he insisted that the new subject matter have a social impact, yet be able to transcend the confines of current political symbols and values. In his essay, “The Romantics Were Prompted,” published in 1949, Rothko argued that the “archaic artist … found it necessary to create a group of intermediaries, monsters, hybrids, gods and demigods” in much the same way that modern man found intermediaries in Fascism and the Communist Party. For Rothko, “without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama.”

Rothko’s new vision would attempt to address modern man’s spiritual and creative mythological requirements. The most crucial philosophical influence on Rothko in this period was Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche claimed that Greek tragedy served to redeem man from the terrors of mortal life. The exploration of novel topics in modern art ceased to be Rothko’s goal. From this time on, his art had the goal of relieving modern man’s spiritual emptiness. He believed that this emptiness resulted partly from lack of a mythology, which, according to Nietzsche, could address “the growth of a child’s mind and — to a mature man his life and struggles”. Rothko believed his art could free unconscious energies previously liberated by mythological images, symbols, and rituals. He considered himself a “mythmaker” and proclaimed that “the exhilarated tragic experience is for me the only source of art”.

The year 1946 saw the creation of Rothko’s transitional “multiform” paintings. The term “multiform” has been applied by art critics; this word was never used by Rothko himself, yet it is an accurate description of these paintings. Several of them, including No. 18 and Untitled (both 1948), are less transitional than fully realized. Rothko himself described these paintings as possessing a more organic structure and as self-contained units of human expression. For him, these blurred blocks of various colors, devoid of landscape or the human figure, let alone myth and symbol, possessed their own life force. They contained a “breath of life” he found lacking in most figurative painting of the era. They filled with possibility, whereas his experimentation with mythological symbolism had become a tired formula. The “multiforms” brought Rothko to a realization of his mature, signature style, the only style Rothko would never fully abandon.

In May 2012, Rothko’s 1961 painting Orange, Red, Yellow (#693 in Anfam’s catalogue raisonné) was sold by Christie’s in New York for 86.9 million dollars, setting a new nominal-value record for a postwar painting at a public auction.