Mark Rothko - Rothko in Florence

Mark Rothko (Markus Rothkowitz) was born in Dvinsk, Russia, in 1903. At the age of ten, he emigrated with his mother and sister to the United States, joining his father and brothers in Portland. From 1921 to 1923 he attended Yale University before moving to New York. In 1929 he began teaching at the Center Academy of the Brooklyn Jewish Center, a position he held for the next twenty years. In 1935 he founded the group The Ten, exhibiting with them until 1940. Between 1936 and 1937 he worked for the Easel Division of the W.P.A. Federal Art Project, painting works for government buildings. In 1940 he co-founded the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors.

His paintings and watercolours from the late 1930s to 1946 reveal his interest in Greek mythology, primitive art, and psychoanalysis. Influenced by the Surrealists, Rothko experimented with automatic drawing, creating abstract forms alluding to human and animal life. In 1945, Surrealist-inspired works were shown in his solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in New York. He also exhibited several times at the annual exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Towards the end of the 1940s, Rothko’s work underwent a decisive shift: he abandoned figuration, including its Surrealist variations, to concentrate on abstract compositions that became his distinctive hallmark. His large-scale canvases were built from floating, layered expanses of colour. In 1954 he held a major solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 1958 he exhibited at the Venice Biennale. That same year he accepted the celebrated commission for a cycle of paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York’s Seagram Building. Later, Rothko withdrew from the commissioon and these works were donated to Tate in London, with the agreement that they be displayed together in a dedicated room. Further exhibitions followed at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1962 and the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1963. Go to Website

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