Social Skills 101

Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko

Childhood

Mark Rothko (Marcus Rothkowitz, Mark Rotkovich) was born in Dvinsk, Vitebsk Province, Russian Empire (now Daugavpils, Latvia). His father, Jacob Rothkowitz, was a pharmacist and an intellectual, who provided his children with a secular and political, rather than religious, upbringing. Unlike Jews in most cities of Czarist Russia, those in Dvinsk had been spared from violent outbreak of anti-Semitic pogroms. However, in an environment where Jews were often blamed for many of the evils that befell Russia, Rothko early childhood was plagued with fear.

Despite Jacob Rothkowitz’s modest income, the family was highly educated, and able to speak Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew. Following Jacob’s return to Orthodox Judaism, he sent Marcus, his youngest son, to the cheder at age 5, where he studied the Talmud although his elders had been educated in the public school system.

Emigration from Russia to the U.S.

Fearing that his sons were about to be drafted into the Czarist army, Jacob Rothkowitz emigrated from Russia to the United States, following the path of many other Jews who left Daugavpils in the wake of Cossack purges. These migrs included two of Jacob’s brothers, who managed to establish themselves as clothing manufacturers in Portland, Oregon, a common profession among Eastern European immigrants. Marcus remained in Russia with his mother and elder sister Sonia. They joined Jacob and the elder brothers later, arriving at Ellis Island in the winter of 1913 after twelve days at sea. Jacob’s death a few months later left the family without economic support. One of Marcus great aunts did unskilled labor, Sonia operated a cash register, while Marcus worked in one of his uncle warehouses, selling newspapers to employees.

Marcus started school in the United States in 1913, quickly accelerating from third to fifth grade, and completed the secondary level with honors at Lincoln High School in Portland, in June 1921 at the age of seventeen. He learned his fourth language, English, and became an active member of the Jewish community center, where he proved adept at political discussions. Like his father, Rothko was passionate about such issues as workers rights and women’s right to contraception.

He received a scholarship to Yale based on academic performance, but it has been suggested that Yale only made this offer in order to lure Rothko friend, Aaron Director, with a similar proposal. After one year, the scholarship ran out and Rothko took menial jobs to support his studies.

Rothko found the “WASP” Yale community to be elitist and racist. He and Aaron Director started a satirical magazine, The Yale Saturday Evening Pest, which lampooned the school stuffy, bourgeois attitude. Following his second year, Rothko dropped out, and did not return until he was awarded an honorary degree forty-six years later.

Early career

In the autumn of 1923, Rothko found work in New York’s garment district and took up residence on the Upper West Side. 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. Even his self-described “beginning” at the Art Students League of New York was not whole-hearted commitment; two months after he returned to Portland to visit his family, he joined a theater group run by Clark Gable wife, Josephine Dillon. Whatever his theatrical ability may have been, he did not have the appearance typically associated with successful commercial actors, and professional acting seemed an improbable career.

Returning to New York, Rothko briefly enrolled in the New School of Design, where one of his instructors was the artist Arshile Gorky. This was probably his first encounter with a member of the “avant-garde”. That autumn, he took courses at the Art Students League of New York taught by still-life artist Max Weber, who was also a Russian Jew. It was due to Weber that Rothko began to see art as a tool of emotional and religious expression, and Rothko paintings from this era portray a Weberian influence.

Rothko circle

Rothko move to New York established him in a fertile artistic atmosphere. Modernist painters had shows in the New York galleries, and the city museums were an invaluable resource to foster a budding artist knowledge, experience and skills. Among those early influences were the works of the German Expressionists, the surrealist work of Paul Klee, and the paintings of Georges Rouault. In 1928, Rothko had his own showing with a group of young artists at the appropriately named Opportunity Gallery. His paintings included dark, moody, expressionist interiors, as well as urban scenes, and were generally well accepted among critics and peers. Despite modest success, Rothko still needed to supplement his income, and in 1929 he began giving classes in painting and clay sculpture at the Center Academy, where he remained as teacher until 1952. During this time, he met Adolph Gottlieb, who, along with Barnett Newman, Joseph Solman, Louis Schanker, and John Graham, was part of a group of young artists surrounding the painter Milton Avery, fifteen years Rothko senior. Avery stylized, natural scenes, utilizing a rich knowledge of form and color, would be a tremendous influence on Rothko. His own paintings, soon after meeting Avery, began to use similar subject matter and color, as in Rothko 1933/34 Bathers, or Beach Scene.

Rothko, Gottlieb, Newman, Solman, Graham, and their mentor, Avery, spent considerable time together, vacationing at Lake George and Gloucester, Massachusetts, spending their days painting and their evenings discussing art. During a 1932 visit to Lake George, Rothko met Edith Sachar, a jewelry designer, who he married on November 12. The following summer, Rothko first one-man show was held at the Portland Art Museum, consisting mostly of drawings and aquarelles, as well as the works of Rothko pre-adolescent students from the Center Academy. His family was unable to understand Rothko decision to be an artist, especially considering the dire economic situation of the Depression. Having suffered serious financial setbacks, the Rothkowitzes were mystified by Rothko seeming indifference to financial necessity; they felt he was doing his mother a disservice by not finding a more lucrative and realistic career.

First one-man show in New York

Returning to New York, Rothko had his first East Coast one-man show at the Contemporary Arts Gallery. He showed fifteen oil paintings, mostly portraits, along with some aquarelles and drawings. It was the oils that would capture the critics eye; Rothko use of rich fields of colors showed a master touch, and moved beyond the influence of Avery. In late 1935, Rothko joined with Ilya Bolotowsky, Ben-Zion, Adolph Gottlieb, Lou Harris, Ralph Rosenborg, Louis Schanker and Joseph Solman to form “The Ten” (Whitney Ten Dissenters), whose mission (according to a catalog from a 1937 Mercury Gallery show) was “to protest against the reputed equivalence of American painting and literal painting.” Rothko’s style was already evolving in the direction of his renowned later works, yet, despite this newfound exploration of color, Rothko turned his attention to another formal and stylistic innovation, inaugurating a period of surrealist paintings influenced by mythological fables and symbols. He was earning a growing reputation among his peers, particularly among the group who formed the Artists’ Union. Begun in 1937, and including Gottlieb and Soloman, their plan was to create a municipal art gallery to show self-organized group exhibitions. The Artists’ Union was a cooperative which brought together resources and talent of various artists to create an atmosphere of mutual admiration and self-promotion. In 1936, the group showed at the Galerie Bonaparte in France. Then, in 1938, a show was held at the Mercury Gallery, in direct defiance of the Whitney Museum, which the group regarded as having a provincial, regionalist agenda. It was also during this period that Rothko, like many artists, found employment with the Works Progress Administration, a labor relief agency created under Roosevelt New Deal in response to the economic crisis. As the Depression waned, Rothko continued on in government service, working for TRAP, an agency that employed artists, architects and laborers in the restoration and renovation of public buildings. Many other important artists were also employed by TRAP, including Avery, DeKooning, Pollock, Reinhardt, David Smith, Louise Nevelson, eight of the “Ten” artists of the dissenter group, and Rothko old teacher, Arshile Gorky.

Development of style

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.”

The modernist artist, like the child and the primitive by whom he is influenced, expresses an innate feeling for form that is, in the best and most universal work, expressed without mental interference. It is a physical and emotional, non-intellectual experience. Rothko was using fields of color in his aquarelles and city scenes, and his subject matter and form at this time had become non-intellectual.

Rothko’s work matured from representation and mythological subjects into rectangular fields of color and light, that later culminated or self-destructed in his final works for the Rothko Chapel. However, between the primitivist and playful urban scenes and aquarelles of the early period, and the late,

Popularity: 1%

Developing Communication Skills - How It Leads To Success

No related posts.

No comments yet.

Leave a comment