1. Mark Rothko

2. Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978). [Untitled] (Mark Rothko).
Gelatin silver photograph, Sheet: 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga

3. The Rothkowitz family before leaving Latvia, circa 1910.

4. Family portrait taken in Dvinsk
Family portrait taken in Dvinsk. From the left: Albert and Sonia Rothkowitz, a first cousin, and Marcus and Moise Rothkowitz, c. 1912
Mark Rothko was born Marcus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Russia (today Daugavpils, Latvia), on September 25, He was the fourth child of Jacob Rothkowitz, a pharmacist (b. 1859), and Anna Goldin Rothkowitz (b. 1870), who had married in Rothko and his family immigrated to the United States when he was ten years old, and settled in Portland, Oregon.
Rothko attended Yale University in 1921, where he studied English, French, European history, elementary mathematics, physics, biology, economics, the history of philosophy, and general psychology. His initial intention was to become an engineer or an attorney. Rothko gave up his studies in the fall of 1923 and moved to New York City.

5. Mark Rothko (Rothkowitz), Lincoln High School

6. Early career

7. Arshile Gorky working on Activities on the field, one of the panels for his mural Aviation at Newark Airport, for the Federal Art Project, 1936

8. Max Weber The Visit. 1919
 Brooklyn Museum

9. Max Weber The Cellist. 1917
Was featured in Weber's 1930 retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art

10. Mark Rothko Woman and Cat. 1933
Oil on canvas

11. Mark Rothko Untitled (Reclining nude). 1937

12. Mark Rothko. The Party. 1938
Oil on canvas

13. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Street, Berlin. 1913
Oil on canvas, x 91.1 cm

14. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Potsdamer Platz. 1914
Oil on canvas, ns 200 x 150 cm
Neue Galerie New York - Museum for German and Austrian Art and Private Collection

15. Paul Klee Flower Myth (Blumenmythos) 1918
Watercolor on pastel foundation on fabric and newsprint mounted on board

16. Paul Klee Fire in the Evening. 1929
The Museum of Modern Art

17. Adolph Gottlieb Pictograph. 1942
Oil on canvas

18. Milton Avery Artist's Wife. 1930

19. Thomas Hart Benton Achelous and Hercules. 1947
Mural was made for a Kansas City department store, now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum

20. Mark Rothko Subway. 1939
Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 1/8in. (101.6 x 76.5cm)
Private collection, Brooklyn, New York
In the mid-1930s Mark Rothko began a series of works with subjects derived from the urban experience that became known as the Subway series. These paintings reflect the artist's sense of isolation, shared by many at the time, that resulted from the harsh social conditions caused by the Great Depression. Although figurative, these paintings accentuate the geometry underlying the elements of the city's infrastructure and thus prefigure Rothko's later concentration on rectangular shapes of luminous colors in his celebrated abstract paintings.

21. Mark Rothko Entrance to Subway. 1938
This early figurative work demonstrates Rothko's interest in contemporary urban life. The architectural features of the station are sketchily recreated, including the turnstiles and the "N" on the wall. Although the mood of the pictures is softened somewhat by the influence of Impressionism, it reflects many of the artist's feelings towards the modern city. New York City was thought to be soulless and inhuman, and something of that is conveyed here in the anonymous, barely rendered features of the figures.

22. Mark Rothko Untitled. (The Subway). 1937

23. Mark Rothko Untitled (The Subway) 1937

24. Mark Rothko Subway Scene. 1938
At the root of Rothko's presentation of archaic forms and symbols as subject matter illuminating modern existence had been the influence of Surrealism, Cubism, and abstract art. In 1936, Rothko attended two exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, "Cubism and Abstract Art," and "Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism." Both experiences greatly influenced his celebrated

25. Mark Rothko Untitled Subway. 1937

26. Maturity

27. Mark Rothko Oedipus. 1944
Greek mythology was an important theme of Rothko's work in the early 1940s. Oedipus, who is said to have solved of the riddle of the Sphinx, was his father's murderer and his mother's lover. His tale has inspired artists and psychologists alike. For Rothko, he embodied the victim of pride and passion, which the artist believed were at the center of man's destructive nature. As in other representational works of this time, Rothko has dismembered and then recombined his figures so intricately that they became a single mass of human conglomeration. In this way, Rothko sought to suggest how mankind is bound together by tragedy. The figures appear oddly huddled in the corner of a room with strange architecture. The blue and green zigzag pattern recurs in several of his mythological pictures. As Rothko said: "If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas.. …(they) express something real and existing in ourselves."

28. Mark Rothko Untitled. 1942
Oil on canvas DIMENSIONS 28 1/16 x 36 1/4 inches
(71.3 x 92 cm)
Guggenheim Museum

29. Mark Rothko Tiresias. 1944
Oil and charcoal on canvas 

30. Mark Rothko Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea. 1945
Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea is a representative example of Rothko's Surrealist period. The influence of Miro is particularly apparent, specifically in Miro's The Family(1924). Rothko's all-over composition of muted colors, strange translucent figures, horizontal lines, angles, and swirls create a vibrant yet veiled picture of an obscure primeval landscape. Painted while courting Mary Beistel, who would become his second wife, this whimsical scene can also be interpreted as a romance within a mythical and magical world, where the figures are enjoying the ocean as a rose colored dawn is breaking on the horizon.

31. Mark Rothko Personage Two. 1946
Oil on canvas; x 81.9 cm (56⅛ x 32¼ in.)

32. Clyfford Still with PH-170 (1947) and PH-399

33. Mark Rothko Untitled. c.1946-7
Oil on canvas, 70 x 100 cm
Tate

34. Mark Rothko No
Rothko showed eleven paintings at Betty Parsons Gallery in the spring of 1949; No. 9 was among them. Having left behind the figures and landscapes of his earlier work, the "multiforms", of which this is a typical example, featured blurred shapes created from layered washes of paint. The work anticipates Rothko's 1949 breakthrough to the so-called "sectionals". The warm reds, oranges and yellows of No. 9 are disrupted by the strange black mass coming in from the left as well as the brushy swirls of blue in the lower section. The blurred edges, separated color blocks, and beginnings of rectangular registers can be seen, as well as some experiment with size and scale. Far from being merely abstract forms,however, Rothko believed these motifs were objects imbued with his life force - "organisms..with the passion for self-expression."

35. Mark Rothko Untitled. 1947

36. Mark Rothko Untitled. 1947

37. Mark Rothko Sacrifice. April 1946
Watercolor, gouache, and India ink on paper
39 7/16 x 25 7/8 inches (100.2 x 65.8 cm)
Guggenheim Museum

38. Mark Rothko Untitled Untitled (Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Red). 1947
Oil on canvas 47 3/4 x 35 1/2 inches (121 x 90.1 cm)
Guggenheim Museum

39. No
Oil on canvas 164 x 108 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

40. LATE PERIOD

41. Mark Rothko, Yorktown Heights, ca. 1949
Brooklyn Museum, by Consuelo Kanaga

42. Henry Matisse Red studio. 1911

43. Mark Rothko No.13 (Magenta, Black, Green on Orange). 1949

44. Jackson Pollock No. 5, 1948 Oil on fiberboard, 244 × 122 cm.
Private collection

45. Jackson Pollock Autumn Rhythm, 1950,
Enamel on canvas, x cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art

46. Arshile Gorky The Liver is the Cock's Comb, 1944
Oil on canvas, 186 × 249 cm
Albright–Knox Art Gallery,
New York.

47. Mark Rothko Untitled (Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Red)
Oil on canvas
81 1/2 x 66 inches (207 x cm)
Guggenheim Museum

48. Barnett Newman Onement 1, 1948.
Oil on canvas and oil on masking tape on canvas.

49. Mark Rothko Untitled ( Titulurik gabea ). 1952-53
Oil on canvas
9 feet 10 1/8 inches x 14 feet 6 3/16 inches (300 x cm)
Guggenheim Museum

50. Mark Rothko Light, Eart and Blue. 1954
Oil on canvas

51. Mark Rothko No. 61 (Rust and Blue). 1953

52. Mark Rothko Four Darks in Red. 1958
In 1969, Rothko exhibited ten paintings at the Sidney Janis Gallery; Four Darks in Red were among those shown. With its dark, restricted palette, the picture exemplifies Rothko's late-period gravitation towards reds and browns. It established a prototype for the dark red/brown/black palette and horizontal composition that he would later use in the uninstalled Seagram Building paintings. Although the imagery of pictures like Four Darks in Red seems far distant from that of Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea (1944), Rothko believed that the rectangles merely offered a new way of representing the presences or spirits that he tried to capture in those earlier works. "It was not that the figure had been removed," he once said, "..but the symbols for the figures... These new shapes say.. what the figures said." In this way, Rothko imagined a kind of direct communion between himself and the viewer, one which might touch the viewer with a higher spirituality.

53. Mark Rothko painted the Seagram Murals. 1959

54. Roy Lichtenstein Girl with ball. 1961

55. Tom Wesselmann Still Life #28. 1964

56. Andy Warhol Big Torn Campbell's Soup Can (Pepper Pot), 1962

57. Mark Rothko Wall of paintings in Harvard University. Early 1960s

58. The Rothko Chapel. 1965
Set on the campus of St. Thomas Catholic University, the Rothko chapel was funded by John and Dominique de Menil and contains fourteen Rothko mural paintings. There are three triptychs and five individual works. All of these paintings are in hues of dark purple, maroon and black and are of extremely large scale. Rothko worked closely with the architects, having almost complete control over the shape of the building and its meditative environment within. The darkness of the works can be seen as melancholic and expressive of Rothko's mood of his last years. He did not live to see the official opening of the Chapel.
Oil on canvas - Houston, TX

59. Untitled, Black on Gray. 1969
Rothko invited many of the New York art world elite to his studio to view his latest, and what would be his last, series of paintings, the Black on Grays. While the event was mainly shrouded in silence,it was thought by some that these were premonitions of his death. Others thought that with the prevalence of lunar images in popular culture that they were interpretations of moon landscapes, while others thought they were paintings of photographs taken at night. In general, they were not taken very seriously, which was devastating to Rothko, but also affirming, as he often felt that the interior world of his paintings were comprehensible to him alone. The Black on Grays were painted directly on white canvas and lacked the usual underpainting which Rothko liked to "paint against." Working in two registers only, he severely restricted the colors and scaled down the canvas to a more approachable and intimate size. The extreme contrast of light and dark evokes a sadness that played out like a psychological drama, both mythic and tragic.
Acrylic on canvas - Estate of Mark Rothko

60. Completed by Anna Suvorova