Mark Rothko

Yellow, Blue, Orange (1955) By Mark Rothko

1988

Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970) was an American painter of Russian Jewish descent. Although Rothko himself refused to adhere to any art movement, he is generally identified as an abstract expressionist. After spending two years at Yale University, he found the Yale community to be elitist and racist. He started a satirical magazine with friend Aaron Director, The Yale Saturday Evening Pest, which lampooned the school's stuffy, bourgeois tone. Despite being a diligent student, he dropped out and moved to New York City where he discovered his interest in art-making through the Art Students League of New York and Parsons The New School for Design. Through a number of stylistic evolutions and artistic influences, Rothko eventually began to define the signature work in color field studies for which he is now most famous. 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."