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Mark Rothko ( ; Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz until 1940; September 25, 1903February 25, 1970) was an American abstract art painter. He is best known for his color field paintings that depicted irregular and painterly rectangular regions of color, which he produced from 1949 to 1970. Although Rothko did not personally subscribe to any one school, he is associated with the American abstract expressionism movement of modern art.
Born to a Jews family in Daugavpils, Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, Rothko emigrated with his parents and siblings to the United States, arriving at Ellis Island in late 1913 and originally settling in Portland, Oregon. He moved to New York City in 1923 where his youthful period of artistic production dealt primarily with urban scenery. In response to World War II, Rothko's art entered a transitional phase during the 1940s, where he experimented with mythological themes and Surrealism to express tragedy. Toward the end of the decade, Rothko painted canvases with regions of pure color which he further abstracted into rectangular color forms, the idiom he would use for the rest of his life.
In his later career, Rothko executed several canvases for three different mural projects. The Seagram murals were to have decorated the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building, but Rothko eventually grew disgusted with the idea that his paintings would be decorative objects for wealthy diners and refunded the lucrative commission, donating the paintings to museums including the Tate Gallery. The Harvard Mural series was donated to a dining room in Harvard's Holyoke Center (now Smith Campus Center); their colors faded badly over time due to Rothko's use of the pigment lithol red together with regular sunlight exposure. The Harvard series has since been restored using a special lighting technique. Rothko contributed 14 canvases to a permanent installation at the Rothko Chapel, a non-denominational chapel in Houston, Texas.
Although Rothko lived modestly for much of his life, the resale value of his paintings grew tremendously in the decades following his suicide in 1970. His painting No. 6 (Violet, Green and Red) sold in 2014 for $186 million.
Despite Jacob Rothkowitz's modest income, the family was highly educated ("We were a reading family", Rothko's sister recalled), and Rothko spoke Lithuanian Yiddish (Yiddish dialects), Hebrew and Russian. Following his father's return to the Orthodox Judaism of his own youth, Rothko, the youngest of four siblings, was sent to the cheder at age five, where he studied the Talmud, although his elder siblings had been educated in the public school system.
Rothko started school in the United States in 1913, quickly accelerating from third to fifth grade. In June 1921, he completed the secondary level, with honors, at Lincoln High School in Portland, Oregon, at age 17. He learned his fourth language, English, and became an active member of the Jewish community center, where he proved adept at political discussions. Like his father, Rothko was passionate about issues such as workers' rights and contraception. At the time, Portland was a center of revolutionary activity in the U.S. and the region where the revolutionary syndicalist union Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was active.
Having grown up around radical workers' meetings, Rothko attended meetings of the IWW, including such speakers as the radical socialist Bill Haywood and the Anarchism Emma Goldman, where he developed strong oratorical skills he later used in defense of Surrealism. With the onset of the Russian Revolution, Rothko organized debates about it. Despite the repressive political atmosphere, he wished to become a labor union organizer.
Rothko received a scholarship to Yale. At the end of his first year in 1922, the scholarship was not renewed, and he worked as a waiter and delivery boy to support his studies. Rothko was more an autodidact than a diligent pupil:
One of his fellow students remembers that he hardly seemed to study, but that he was a voracious reader.
Rothko and a friend, Aaron Director, started a satirical magazine, The Yale Saturday Evening Pest, that lampooned the school's stuffy, bourgeois tone.Stigler, Stephen M., "Aaron Director Remembered". 48 J. Law and Econ. 307, 2005. Finding Yale to be elitist, and racist, at the end of his sophomore year, Rothko dropped out, never returning until he was awarded an honorary degree 46 years later.
In 1928, with a group of other young artists, Rothko exhibited works at the Opportunity Gallery. His paintings, including dark, moody, expressionist interiors and urban scenes, were generally well accepted among critics and peers. To supplement his income, in 1929 Rothko began instructing schoolchildren in drawing, painting, and clay sculpture at the Center Academy of the Brooklyn Jewish Center, where he remained active for over twenty years.Grange, pg. 20.
During the early 1930s, Rothko met Adolph Gottlieb, who, along with Barnett Newman, Joseph Solman, Louis Schanker, and John Graham, was part of a group of young artists surrounding the painter Milton Avery. According to Elaine de Kooning, it was Avery who "gave Rothko the idea that the was a possibility."Avery's abstract nature paintings, utilizing a rich knowledge of form and color, had a tremendous influence on him. Soon, Rothko's paintings took on the subject matter and color similar to Avery's, as seen in Bathers, or Beach Scene of 1933–1934.On Avery's impact on Rothko: Ashton, pp. 21–25.
Rothko, Gottlieb, Newman, Solman, Graham, and their mentor, Avery, spent considerable time together, vacationing at Lake George, New York, and Gloucester, Massachusetts. In the daytime, they painted, then discussed art in the evenings. During a 1932 visit to Lake George, Rothko met Edith Sachar, a jewelry designer, whom he married later that year. The following summer, his first one-person show was held at the Portland Art Museum, Drawings and Water Colors by M. Rothkowitz, July–August 1933, Museum of Art, Portland. Cited in Adam Greenhalgh, Mark Rothko Paintings on Paper exh. cat. Washington 2023–2004 (Yale University Press, 2023), page 12, no 6. consisting mostly of drawings and .Catherine Jones, "Noted One-Man Show Artist One-Time Portland Resident." Sunday Oregonian (July 30, 1933). Cited by Adam Greenhalgh, Mark Rothko Paintings on Paper exh. cat. Washington 2023–2004 (Yale University Press, 2023), page 13, no 9. For this exhibition, Rothko took the very unusual step of displaying works done by his pre-adolescent students from the Center Academy, alongside his own. His family was unable to understand Rothko's decision to be an artist, especially considering the dire economic situation of the Great Depression. Having suffered serious financial setbacks, the Rothkowitzes were mystified by Rothko's seeming indifference to financial necessity. They felt he was doing his mother a disservice by not finding a more lucrative and realistic career.
Rothko was earning a growing reputation among his peers, particularly among the group that formed the Artists' Union. The Artists' Union, including Gottlieb and Solman, hoped to create a municipal art gallery, to show self-organized group exhibitions. In 1936, the group exhibited at the Galerie Bonaparte in France, which resulted in some positive critical attention. One reviewer remarked that Rothko's paintings "display authentic coloristic values."Ashton, 35. Later, in 1938, a show was held at the Mercury Gallery in New York, intended as a protest against the Whitney Museum of American Art, which the group regarded as having a provincial, regionalist agenda. Also during this period, Rothko, like Avery, Gorky, Pollock, de Kooning, and many others, found employment with the Works Progress Administration.
This period extended into his middle, "transitional" years (1940–1950), continuing incorporation of mythical and "biomorphic" abstraction, and "multiforms", the latter being canvases with large regions of color. Rothko's transitional decade was influenced by World War II, which prompted him to seek novel expression of tragedy in art. During this time Rothko was influenced by ancient Greek tragedians such as Aeschylus and his reading of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy.Grange, pp. 50–54.
In Rothko's mature or "classic" period (1951–1970), he consistently painted rectangular regions of color, intended as "dramas"Grange, p. 47. to elicit an emotional response from the viewer.
Rothko's use of mythology as a commentary on current history was not novel. Rothko, Gottlieb, and Newman read and discussed the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. In particular, they took interest in psychoanalytical theories concerning dreams, and archetypes of a collective unconscious. They understood mythological symbols as images, operating in a space of human consciousness, which transcends specific history and culture. Rothko later said that his artistic approach was "reformed" by his study of the "dramatic themes of myth". He allegedly stopped painting altogether in 1940, to immerse himself in reading James Frazer study of mythology The Golden Bough, and Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams.
Many of his paintings in this period contrast barbaric scenes of violence with civilized passivity, using imagery drawn primarily from Aeschylus's Oresteia trilogy. A list of Rothko's paintings from this period illustrates his use of myth: Antigone, Oedipus, The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Leda, Erinyes, Altar of Orpheus. Rothko evokes Judeo-Christian imagery in Gethsemane, The Last Supper, and Rites of Lilith. He also invokes Egyptian ( Room in Karnak) and Syrian ( The Syrian Bull) myths. Soon after World War II, Rothko believed his titles limited the larger, transcendent aims of his paintings. To allow maximum interpretation by the viewer, he stopped naming and framing his paintings, referring to them only by numbers.
In 1942, following the success of shows by Max Ernst, Miró, Wolfgang Paalen, Yves Tanguy, and Salvador Dalí, artists who had immigrated to the United States because of the war, Surrealism took New York by storm. Rothko and his peers, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman, met and discussed the art and ideas of these European pioneers, as well as those of Piet Mondrian.
New paintings were unveiled at a 1942 show at Macy's department store in New York City. In response to a negative review by The New York Times, Rothko and Gottlieb issued a manifesto, written mainly by Rothko. Addressing the Times critic's self-professed "befuddlement" over the new work, they stated "We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth." On a more strident note, they criticized those who wanted to live surrounded by less challenging art, noting that their work necessarily "must insult anyone who is spiritually attuned to interior decoration".
Rothko viewed myth as a replenishing resource for an era of spiritual void. This belief had begun decades earlier, through his reading of Carl Jung, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Thomas Mann, among other authors.
Rothko's masterpiece Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea (1945) illustrates his newfound propensity towards abstraction. It has been interpreted as a meditation on Rothko's courtship of his second wife, Mary Alice "Mell" Beistle, whom he met in 1944 and married in early 1945. Other readings have noted echoes of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, which Rothko saw at an "Italian Masters" loan exhibition, at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1940. The painting presents, in subtle grays and browns, two human-like forms embraced in a swirling, floating atmosphere of shapes and colors. The rigid rectangular background foreshadows Rothko's later experiments in pure color. The painting was completed, not coincidentally, in the year the Second World War ended.
Although initially hesitant to purchase his works, Guggenheim did acquire several works following Rothko's exhibition at the Art of This Century gallery, including Sacrifice (1946), which she purchased immediately following its completion. Like other works of this period, it depicted biomorphic shapes and abstract imagery in subtle tones. Guggenheim later showed this work in her European galleries, making it among the first of Rothko's paintings to be exhibited outside the United States.
Despite the abandonment of his "Mythomorphic Abstractionism", Rothko would still be recognized by the public primarily for his surrealist works, for the remainder of the 1940s. The Whitney Museum included them in their annual exhibit of contemporary art from 1943 to 1950. Baptismal Scene (1945), included in the shows at the Whitney, was acquired by the museum in 1946; this was the first work of Rothko's to enter a museum collection, marking a key career milestone. Baptismal Scene depicts an abstracted baptism in watercolors against a dusky grayish brown background, with an identifiable baptismal fountain at the top of the painting.
In the middle of this crucial period of transition, Rothko had been impressed by Clyfford Still's abstract fields of color, which were influenced in part by the landscapes of Still's native North Dakota. In 1947, during a summer semester teaching at the California School of Fine Art, Rothko and Still flirted with the idea of founding their own curriculum. In 1948, Rothko, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Barnett Newman, and David Hare founded the Subjects of the Artist School at 35 East 8th Street. Well-attended lectures there were open to the public, with speakers such as Jean Arp, John Cage, and Ad Reinhardt, but the school failed financially and closed in the spring of 1949.
Although the group separated later in the same year, the school was the center of a flurry of activity in contemporary art. In addition to his teaching experience, Rothko began to contribute articles to two new art publications, Tiger's Eye and Possibilities. Using the forums as an opportunity to assess the current art scene, Rothko also discussed in detail his own work and philosophy of art. These articles reflect the elimination of figurative elements from his painting, and a specific interest in the new contingency debate launched by Wolfgang Paalen's Form and Sense publication of 1945.Robert Motherwell published Paalen's collected essays on art from his magazine DYN, as the first number of the series. The number entitled Possibilities, in which Rothko's statement was published, was the second of this series. Form and Sense was re-published in 2013 by Deborah Rosenthal, with a foreword by Martica Sawin. Wolfgang Paalen, Form and Sense, Meanings and Movements in Twentieth-Century Art, New York (Arcade Publishing/Artists and Art), 2013
Rothko described his new method as "unknown adventures in an unknown space", free from "direct association with any particular, and the passion of organism". Breslin described this change of attitude as "both self and painting are now fields of possibilities – an effect conveyed ... by the creation of protean, indeterminate shapes whose multiplicity is let be."
In 1947, he had a first solo exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery (March 3 to 22). In 1949, Rothko became fascinated by Henri Matisse's Red Studio, acquired by the Museum of Modern Art that year. He later credited it as another key source of inspiration for his later abstract paintings.
Rothko happened upon the use of symmetrical rectangular blocks of two to three opposing or contrasting, yet complementary, colors, in which, for example, "the rectangles sometimes seem barely to coalesce out of the ground, concentrations of its substance. The green bar in Magenta, Black, Green on Orange, on the other hand, appears to vibrate against the orange around it, creating an optical flicker."
For the next seven years, Rothko painted in oil only for large canvases with vertical formats. Very large-scale designs were used in order to overwhelm the viewer, or, in Rothko's words, to make the viewer feel "enveloped within" the painting. For some critics, the large size was an attempt to make up for a lack of substance. In retaliation, Rothko stated:
Rothko even went so far as to recommend that viewers position themselves as little as eighteen inches away from the canvas so that they might experience a sense of intimacy, as well as awe, a transcendence of the individual, and a sense of the unknown. As Rothko achieved success, he became increasingly protective of his works, turning down several potentially important sales and exhibition opportunities:
To some critics and viewers, Rothko's aims exceeded his methods.Robert Hughes in (New York: Knopf, 1997) writes admiringly of Rothko's emotional range, "from foreboding and sadness to an exquisite and joyful luminosity", but takes issue with the artist's religious aspirations: "Rothko's work could not, in the end, support the weight of meaning he wanted it to have" (pp. 490–491). Others, like Dore Ashton, would profoundly disagree. Many of the abstract expressionists discussed their art as aiming toward a spiritual experience, or at least an experience that exceeded the boundaries of the purely aesthetic. In later years, Rothko emphasized more emphatically the spiritual aspect of his artwork, a sentiment that would culminate in the construction of the Rothko Chapel.For Hughes, the chapel in Texas offers the final proof that the artist has overreached himself: "the eye ... seeks its nuances. But the expected epiphany does not come" (p. 491).
Many of his early signature paintings are composed of bright, vibrant colors, particularly reds and yellows, expressing energy and ecstasy. By the mid-1950s, however, Rothko began to employ dark blues and greens, which many critics suggested was representative of growing darkness within Rothko's personal life.
To achieve this effect, Rothko applied a thin layer of a binder mixed with pigment directly onto uncoated and untreated canvas and painted significantly thinned oils directly onto this layer, creating a dense mixture of overlapping colors and shapes. One of his objectives was to make the various layers of the painting dry quickly, without mixing of colors, so that he could soon create new layers on top of the earlier ones. His brushstrokes were fast and light, a method he would continue to use until his death. His increasing adeptness at this method is apparent in the paintings completed for the chapel.
Rothko used several original techniques that he tried to keep secret even from his assistants. Electron microscopy and ultraviolet analysis conducted by the MOLAB showed that he employed natural substances such as egg and glue, as well as artificial materials including , phenol formaldehyde, modified alkyd, and others.
In 1968 Rothko, in declining health, began painting most of his large works in acrylic paint instead of oils.
Rothko had one-man shows at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950 and 1951 and at other galleries across the world, including in Japan, São Paulo, and Amsterdam. The 1952 "Fifteen Americans" show curated by Dorothy Canning Miller at the Museum of Modern Art formally heralded the abstract artists and included works by Jackson Pollock and William Baziotes. It also created a dispute between Rothko and Barnett Newman, after Newman accused Rothko of having attempted to exclude him from the show. Growing success as a group was leading to infighting and claims of supremacy and leadership. When Fortune magazine named a Rothko painting in 1955 as a good investment,Anna Chave, Mark Rothko, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, p. 17 Newman and Clyfford Still branded him a sell-out with bourgeois aspirations. Still wrote to Rothko to ask that the paintings he had given him over the years be returned. Rothko was deeply depressed by his former friends' jealousy.
During the 1950 Europe trip, Rothko's wife, Mell, became pregnant. On December 30, when they were back in New York, she gave birth to a daughter, Kathy Lynn, called "Kate" in honor of Rothko's mother, Kate Goldin.
Despite his fame, Rothko felt a growing personal seclusion and a sense of being misunderstood as an artist. He feared that people purchased his paintings simply out of fashion and that collectors, critics, and audiences were not grasping his work's true purpose. He wanted his paintings to move beyond abstraction, as well as beyond classical art. For Rothko, the paintings were objects that possessed their own form and potential and must be encountered as such. Sensing the futility of words in describing this decidedly nonverbal aspect of his work, Rothko abandoned all attempts at responding to those who inquired after its meaning and purpose, saying finally that silence is "so accurate":
My paintings' surfaces are expansive and push outward in all directions, or their surfaces contract and rush inward in all directions. Between these two poles, you can find everything I want to say.
Rothko began to insist that he was not an abstractionist and that such a description was as inaccurate as labeling him a great colorist. His interest was:
For Rothko, color was "merely an instrument",Baal-Teshuva, p. 57. and the signature paintings were just a simpler, purer form of expressing the same basic human emotions as his surrealistic mythological paintings. Rothko's comment on viewers breaking down in tears before his paintings may have convinced the de Menils to construct the Rothko Chapel. As he grew older, hingeing around the late 1950s, the spiritual expression he meant to portray on canvas grew increasingly dark, and his bright reds, yellows, and oranges were subtly transformed into dark blues, greens, grays, and blacks.
Rothko's friend, the art critic Dore Ashton, points to the artist's acquaintance with poet Stanley Kunitz as a significant bond in this period ("conversations between painter and poet fed into Rothko's enterprise"). Kunitz saw Rothko as "a primitive, a shaman who finds the magic formula and leads people to it". Great poetry and painting, Kunitz believed, both had "roots in magic, incantation, and spell-casting" and were, at their core, ethical and spiritual. Kunitz instinctively understood the purpose of Rothko's quest.
In November 1958, Rothko gave an address to the Pratt Institute. In a tenor unusual for him, he discussed art as a trade and offered the
recipe of a work of art—its ingredients—how to make it—the formula
- There must be a clear preoccupation with death—intimations of mortality ... Tragic art, romantic art, etc., deals with the knowledge of death.
- Sensuality. Our basis of being concrete about the world. It is a lustful relationship with things that exist.
- Tension. Either conflict or curbed desire.
- Irony, This is a modern ingredient—the self-effacement and examination by which a man for an instant can go on to something else.
- Wit and play ... for the human element.
- The ephemeral and chance ... for the human element.
- Hope. 10% to make the tragic concept more endurable.
I measure these ingredients very carefully when I paint a picture. It is always the form that follows these elements and the picture results from the proportions of these elements.Achim Borchardt-Hume (ed.). Rothko (London: Tate Gallery, 2008), p. 91
For Rothko, this Seagram murals commission presented a new challenge, since it was the first time he was required not only to design a coordinated series of paintings but to produce an artwork space concept for a large, specific interior. Over the following three months, Rothko completed forty paintings, comprising three full series in dark red and brown. He altered his horizontal format to vertical, to complement the restaurant's vertical features: columns, walls, doors, and windows.
The following June, Rothko and his family again traveled to Europe. While on the SS Independence he disclosed to journalist John Fischer, who was publisher of Harper's Magazine, that his true intention for the Seagram murals was to paint "something that will ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room". He hoped, he told Fischer, that his painting would make the restaurant's patrons "feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall".
While in Europe, the Rothkos traveled to Rome, Florence, Venice, and Pompeii. In Florence, he visited Michelangelo's Laurentian Library, to see first-hand the library's vestibule, from which he drew further inspiration for the murals. He remarked that "the room had exactly the feeling that I wanted ... it gives the visitor the feeling of being caught in a room with the doors and windows walled-in shut." He was further influenced by the somber colors of the murals in the Pompeiian Villa of the Mysteries. Following the trip to Italy, the Rothkos voyaged to Paris, Brussels, Antwerp and Amsterdam, before going to London, where Rothko spent time in the British Museum studying the Turner watercolors. They then traveled to Somerset and stayed with the artist William Scott, who was just starting a large mural project, and they discussed the respective issues of public and private sponsorship. After the visit the Rothkos continued to St. Ives in the West of England and met up with Patrick Heron and other Cornish painters before returning to London and then the United States.
Back in New York, Rothko and his wife Mell visited the nearly completed Four Seasons restaurant. Upset with the restaurant's dining atmosphere, which he considered pretentious and inappropriate for the display of his works, Rothko refused to continue the project and returned his cash advance to the Seagram and Sons Company. Seagram had intended to honor Rothko's emergence to prominence through his selection, and his breach of contract and public expression of outrage was unexpected.
Rothko kept the commissioned paintings in storage until 1968. Given that Rothko had known in advance about the luxury decor of the restaurant, and the social class of its future patrons, the motives for his abrupt repudiation remain mysterious, although he did write to his friend William Scott in England, "Since we had discussed our respective murals I thought you might be interested to know that mine are still with me. When I returned, I looked again at my paintings and then visited the premises for which they were destined, it seemed clear to me at once that the two were not for each other." A temperamental personality, Rothko never fully explained his conflicted emotions over the incident.Schama, pp. 428–434. One reading is offered by his biographer, James E.B. Breslin: the Seagram project could be seen as an acting-out of a familiar, in this case self-created "drama of trust and betrayal, of advancing into the world, then withdrawing, angrily, from it ... He was an Isaac who at the last moment refused to yield to Abraham." The final series of Seagram Murals was dispersed, and now hangs in three locations: London's Tate Britain, Japan's Kawamura Memorial Museum, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. This episode was the main basis for John Logan's 2009 play Red.
In October 2012, Black on Maroon, one of the paintings in the Seagram series, was defaced with writing in black ink, while on display at Tate Modern. Restoration of the painting took 18 months. The BBC's Arts Editor Will Gompertz explained that the ink from the vandal's marker pen had bled all the way through the canvas, causing "a deep wound, not a superficial graze", and that the vandal had caused "significant damage".
Rothko called pop artists "charlatans and young opportunists", and wondered aloud during a 1962 exhibition of pop art, "Are the young artists plotting to kill us all?" On viewing Jasper Johns's flags, Rothko said, "We worked for years to get rid of all that."
On August 31, 1963, Mell gave birth to a second child, Christopher. That autumn, Rothko signed with the Marlborough Gallery for sales of his work outside the United States. In New York, he continued to sell the artwork directly from his studio.
For Rothko, the chapel was a place of pilgrimage far from the center of art (in this case, New York) where seekers of his newly "religious" artwork could journey. The chapel is now nondenominational, but it was originally intended to be Roman Catholic. During the first three years of the project (1964–67), Rothko believed it would remain so. The building's design and the paintings' religious implications were inspired by Roman Catholic art and architecture. Its octagonal shape is based on a Byzantine church of St. Maria Assunta, and the format of the triptychs is based on paintings of the Crucifixion. The de Menils believed the universal "spiritual" aspect of Rothko's work would complement the elements of Roman Catholicism.
Rothko's painting technique necessitated physical strength and stamina that the ailing artist could no longer muster. He hired two assistants to apply the multiple layers of paint. On half of the works, Rothko applied none of the paint himself and was content to supervise the slow, arduous process. He felt the completion of the paintings to be "torment", and the inevitable result was to create "something you don't want to look at".
The chapel represents six years of Rothko's life and his growing concern for the transcendent. For some, viewing the chapel's these paintings is akin submitting to a spiritual experience. The paintings have been likened to self-awareness, hermeticism, and contemplativeness.
The chapel paintings consist of a monochrome triptych in soft brown, on the central wall, comprising three 5-by-15-foot panels and a pair of triptychs on the left and right made of opaque black rectangles. Between the triptychs are four individual paintings, measuring 11-by-15 feet each. One additional individual painting faces the central triptych, from the opposite wall. The effect is to surround the viewer with massive, imposing visions of darkness. Despite its basis in religious symbolism and imagery, the paintings may be considered distinct from traditional Christian motifs and may act on the viewers subliminally. Rothko's erasure of symbols both removes and creates barriers to the work.
The paintings were unveiled at the chapel's opening in 1971. Rothko never saw the completed chapel and never installed the paintings. On February 28, 1971, at the dedication, Dominique de Menil said, "We are cluttered with images and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine", noting Rothko's courage in painting "impenetrable fortresses" of color.
On February 25, 1970, Oliver Steindecker, Rothko's assistant, found the artist lying dead on the kitchen floor in front of the sink, covered in blood. He had overdosed on barbiturates and cut an artery in his right arm with a razor blade. There was no suicide note. He was 66. The Seagram Murals arrived in London for display at the Tate Gallery on the day of his suicide.
Near the end of his life, Rothko painted a series known as the "Black on Grays", uniformly featuring a black rectangle above a gray rectangle. These canvases and Rothko's later work in general have been associated with his depression and suicide, although the association has been criticized.Grange, p. 175. Rothko's suicide has been studied in medical literature, where his later paintings have been interpreted as "pictorial suicide notes" due to their somber palettes and especially in contrast to the brighter colors Rothko employed more frequently during the 1950s. Although art critic David Anfam acknowledged that the Black and Grays are interpreted as premonitions of suicide or as "moonscapes" (the first Apollo Program Moon landings were contemporaneous with their execution), he rejected the interpretations as "naive", arguing instead that the paintings were a continuation of his lifelong artistic themes and not symptoms of depression.Anfam, pp. 97–99. Susan Grange observed that, after his aneurysm, Rothko executed several smaller works on paper using lighter hues, which are less well-known.Grange, pp. 174–179. Throughout his life Rothko consistently intended his works to evoke serious dramatic content, regardless of the colors used in a particular painting. When a woman visited his studio asking to buy a "happy" painting featuring , Rothko retorted, "Red, yellow, orange – aren't those the colors of an inferno?"
Shortly before his death, Rothko and his financial advisor, Bernard Reis, created a foundation intended to fund "research and education" that received the bulk of Rothko's work after his death. Reis later sold the paintings to the Marlborough Gallery, at substantially reduced values, and then split the profits from sales with Gallery representatives. In 1971, Rothko's daughter Kate, who was 19 at the time of his death, sued Reis, Morton Levine, and Theodoros Stamos, the executors of his estate, over the sham sales. The lawsuit continued for more than 10 years and became known as the Rothko Case. In 1975, the defendants were found liable for negligence and conflict of interest, were removed as executors of the Rothko estate by court order, and, along with Marlborough Gallery, were required to pay $9.2 million in damages to the estate. This amount represents only a small fraction of the eventual value of numerous Rothko works.(case cite 372 N.E.2d 291) Marlborough Gallery was also required to return the remaining 658 unsold paintings to two parties. One half of the remaining paintings were given to Rothko's estate, which was now controlled by Kate in addition to, eventually, her brother Christopher, who was 6 years old at the time of Rothko's death. The other half were given to the Mark Rothko Foundation, which the court had reestablished as part of the lawsuit proceedings, appointing investment banker and art collector Donald M. Blinken as the foundation's president.
Rothko's estranged wife Mell, also a heavy drinker, died six months after him at the age of 48. The cause of death was listed as "hypertension due to cardiovascular disease".
Rothko's complete works on canvas, 836 paintings, have been catalogued by art historian David Anfam, in his Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas: Catalogue Raisonné (1998), published by Yale University Press.
In 2023, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris staged a landmark retrospective co-curated by Christopher Rothko, the artist’s son. The exhibition brought together 115 works spanning Rothko’s entire career, including early figurative paintings, key abstract canvases, and late “black on gray” works.
A previously unpublished manuscript by Rothko, The Artist's Reality (2004), about his philosophies on art, edited by his son Christopher, was published by Yale University Press.
Red, a play by John Logan based on Rothko's life, opened at the Donmar Warehouse in London, on December 3, 2009. The play, starring Alfred Molina and Eddie Redmayne, centered on the period of the Seagram Murals. This drama received excellent reviews and usually played to full houses. In 2010 Red opened on Broadway theatre, where it won six , including Best Play. Molina played Rothko in both London and New York. A recording of Red was produced in 2018 for Great Performances with Molina playing Rothko and Alfred Enoch playing his assistant.
In Rothko's birthplace, the Latvian city of Daugavpils, a monument to him, designed by sculptor Romualds Gibovskis, was unveiled on the bank of the Daugava in 2003. In 2013 the Mark Rothko Art Centre opened in Daugavpils after the Rothko family had donated a small collection of his original works.Sophia Kishkovsky (April 25, 2013), Latvia opens museum dedicated to Rothko . The Art Newspaper.
A number of Rothko's works are held by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and by the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, both in Madrid. The Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, New York includes both Rothko's painting Untitled (1967) and a large mural by Al Held, Rothko's Canvas (1969–70).
Fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy showed fabrics inspired by Rothko in 1971. A number of musical compositions have been inspired by Rothko's work, including Adam Schoenberg's Finding Rothko (2006) and Anna Clyne's Color Field (2020).
Works by Rothko have continued to regularly achieve prices at auction ranging as high as $80 million through the 2020s. His painting No. 6 (Violet, Green and Red) sold in 2014 for $186 million.
Whitechapel Gallery exhibition
Smithsonian Archives of American Art
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