Of Latvian and Jewish origin, Marcus Rothkowitz was born on September 25, 1903. While still a child his family moved to the United States, where he went on to study (briefly) at the University of Yale and then, from 1923, at the Art Students League of New York and the New York School of Design, under Arshile Gorky and Max Weber. Starting his artistic life with primitivist and playful urban scenes and then mythological imagery, he gradually explored colour and form more and more, finally arriving at the transcendent and boundless fields of colour for which he is most well-known. After a successful career as part of the Color Field movement that lasted for about three decades, on February 25, 1970, the painter swallowed a large quantity of anti-depressants and sliced his arms, thus ending his life at age 66. An aneurysm he had suffered two years earlier that greatly diminished his ability to paint and the end of his second marriage probably led to this desperate decision.
The painting presented above is on display at the Museum of Modern Art of New York and is 217 by 165 cm. It belongs to the signature structure that the artist explored from 1947 to his death, layer upon layer upon layer of thin veils of paint that form unevenly coloured rectangles and other horizontally elongated blurry shapes, of fuzzy and blended edges, vibrating against each other and floating freely over space. Rothko thought of these ample blocks of colour as "self-contained units of human expression" and wanted them to encompass and overwhelm the viewers, evoking intense emotions, relieving the spiritual emptiness of the modern world.
I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom. If you are moved only by color relationships, then you miss the point.
We favor the simple expression of the complex thought.
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