biography
| name: |
Rothko, Mark
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originally Marcus Rothkovitch
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1903–70)
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| biography:
| Painter, born in Dvinsk, Russia (now Daugavpils, Latvia). His immigrant parents settled in Portland, OR in 1913. After two years at Yale he settled in New York City, and except for a brief time studying with Max Weber (1925), he became a self-taught painter. During the 1930s he moved through various styles, starting with traditional representational subjects, then mythological themes, and in 1935–7 was employed by the Federal Arts Project. In the early 1940s he took an interest in Surrealism, but by 1947 his works became increasingly more abstract and by 1950 he found his true style in so-called colour-field paintings, works with large rectangles of colour that express moods, as in ‘Four Darks in Red’ (1958). In 1961 he had a one-man retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, an honour reserved for the giants of art. In 1970 he had two more major exhibits, at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but he committed suicide that year, shortly after he had completed what some regard as his masterwork, a group of murals for an interdenominational chapel in Houston, TX. |
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