Everything you need to know about Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko’s early life was shaped by upheaval. Born Markus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Russia — now Daugavpils, Latvia — in 1903, he emigrated to the United States with his family at the age of 10, settling in Portland, Oregon. The experience of displacement would echo throughout his life and work, informing his drive to capture universal human feeling. In 1940, amidst rising antisemitism and political uncertainty, Rothko anglicized his name, a change that coincided with an evolution in his artistic output.

Although Rothko is now synonymous with vast, meditative canvases of colour, his early work reflects a wide range of subjects and influences. In the 1930s and early 1940s, he produced landscapes, nudes, portraits and cityscapes, some created during his time with the Works Progress Administration amid the Great Depression.

Rothko’s thematic interests were equally diverse. Drawing on subjects including Greek mythology, Surrealism, Christian tragedy and classical architecture, he moved through a series of stylistic phases before turning towards pure abstraction.

By the late 1940s, Rothko had developed the style that would define his legacy, in which luminous rectangles of colour hover against soft, atmospheric grounds. Rejecting traditional tenets of picture-making, he instead privileged space and colour.

It was at this time that Peggy Guggenheim gave him one of his first significant solo exhibitions at her New York gallery, Art of this Century. Her patronage helped position him at the centre of the Abstract Expressionist movement, as she continued to support his work at home and abroad. He was also closely connected to his contemporaries such as Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, whose friendships and exchanges helped shape the development of his work.

In 1955, the critic Clement Greenberg described Rothko’s style as Color Field painting, a term that would come to define a major movement in post-war American art. Rothko emerged as one of its early pioneers, emphasising expansive fields of colour, minimal forms and the emotional resonance of a purely visual experience.

As his practice expanded, Rothko was championed by other notable patrons and developed close relationships with figures such as Dominique and John de Menil, Betty Parsons and Agnes Gund.

Influenced in part by Henri Matisse’s saturated tones, Rothko embraced colour as a primary vehicle for emotion. Rejecting the tradition of painting as a representation of life, he insisted that ‘a painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience.’ Through abstraction, he sought to create works that reflect the shared human experience.

Rothko achieved this effect through a meticulous process of layering thin washes of pigment. These translucent layers created a signature inner glow and a profound sense of depth, drawing the viewer into the painting’s atmospheric field. With this shift he moved beyond storytelling towards a more timeless and universal expression.

Although often associated with the fiery reds, golden yellows and deep oranges characteristic of his works from the early to mid-1950s, Rothko’s palette was not static. He later explored darker, more subdued tonalities, with his final years dominated by deep maroons, browns and blacks. In contrast to the vibrancy of his earlier canvases, these darker works evoke introspection and quiet intensity, suggesting a turn from outward radiance to inward contemplation.

In addition to colour, Rothko used scale to heighten emotional intensity. He considered size an essential element of his practice, saying: ‘To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon it as through a stereopticon or reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command.’ Accordingly, many of his works are monumental, with some, such as the Seagram Murals, exceeding 11 feet in width. He described this immersive quality as ‘intimate and human’.

By 1968, Rothko’s health was in decline, prompting a change in his working methods. He reduced the scale of his canvases and began working with acrylics more frequently, easing the physical demands of his process while maintaining the intensity of his vision.

Rothko’s first major commission came in 1958, when he was invited to create a series of murals for the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building. Known for its minimalist aesthetic, the 38-storey tower was designed by Philip Johnson and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The glamorous ground-floor restaurant, with its marble pool and walnut panelling, catered to New York’s elite.

Rothko was commissioned to create a suite of paintings that would have pride of place in the restaurant’s main dining room. The resulting works, now known as the Seagram Murals, were among the most ambitious of his career. Yet after more than two years and approximately 30 canvases, he grew increasingly uneasy about installing his works in a luxury restaurant. Ultimately, he withdrew from the commission and returned the payment. The murals were later dispersed to institutions including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and the Tate Modern in London.

Rothko nonetheless continued to pursue major commissions. In 1961, he created a series of murals for Harvard’s Holyoke Center, and between 1964 and 1967 he completed his final project: the Rothko Chapel in Houston. The chapel’s interior sanctuary houses 14 large canvases, serving not only as a space for quiet contemplation but also as one of the most profound environments in modern art.

More than half a century after his death in 1970, his paintings continue to rank among the most coveted works in the global art market. Their rarity, scale and cultural significance have made them cornerstones of museum and private collections alike.

In 2012, Rothko’s painting Orange, Red, Yellow (1961) broke records when it was sold for $86,882,496 at Christie’s.

His lasting power lies in a vision of painting as an emotional — almost spiritual — encounter, one that continues to resonate in the public consciousness.