Mark Rothko — painter with roots in the Russian Empire
Mark Rothko was born Marcus Rothkowitz on 25 September 1903 in Dvinsk, in the Vitebsk Governorate of the Russian Empire, now Daugavpils in Latvia. He was the youngest of four children of Jacob Rothkowitz, a pharmacist, and Anna Goldin. The family was Jewish and educated; Marcus attended a religious school, where he studied the Talmud.
His father emigrated to the United States in 1910 and settled in Portland, Oregon, where relatives were in business. In 1913 Marcus, then ten, followed with his mother and sister. His father died within months of their arrival, and the boy worked in a relative's warehouse while finishing school. He spoke Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew before he learned English.
He won a scholarship to Yale in 1921 but left after two years, moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students League, where he studied with Max Weber. He spent the 1920s and 1930s painting figurative and then mythological subjects, teaching children's art classes at the Center Academy in Brooklyn and, with Adolph Gottlieb and others, forming the group known as The Ten. He became an American citizen in 1938 and in 1940 began using the name Mark Rothko.
From about 1949 he arrived at the work for which he is known: large canvases of soft-edged rectangles of colour floating on a coloured ground, meant to be seen close up and to produce an emotional rather than a decorative response. He became, with Jackson Pollock and others, one of the central figures of Abstract Expressionism.
In 1958 he accepted a commission for murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building, then withdrew from it; nine of the paintings were given to the Tate in London, arriving there on the day of his death. His last great project was a chapel in Houston for the collectors John and Dominique de Menil, the Rothko Chapel, which opened in 1971.
He took his own life in his New York studio on 25 February 1970, aged sixty-six. In 2013 a Mark Rothko Art Centre opened in Daugavpils, in the town where he was born, with original works lent by his children.
"Emigrated from Dvinsk, Russian Empire to the United States in 1913, age ten."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Daugavpils (Latvia)
Born Marcus Rothkowitz in 1903 in Dvinsk, in the Vitebsk Governorate of the Russian Empire (now Daugavpils, Latvia), he emigrated with his mother and sister to Portland, Oregon, in 1913, joining his father, who had gone ahead.
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Daugavpils (Latvia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
""I am not an abstractionist. I am not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I am interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom.""