Serigraph on ragpaper ROTHKO - Untitled n°16 1950

Mark Rothko

Marcus Rothkowitz, who would only take the name Mark Rothko in January 1940, was born in Russia in 1903, but it was in the United States, where his family emigrated in 1913 due to the pogroms and Cossack purges, that he grew up.

First in Portland, then at Yale, he studied, became a drawing teacher, and painted while having a high opinion of himself and his emerging art. Cultivated, politically engaged, Rothko was an intellectual in the classic and "European" sense of the term.

Like many abstract artists, his beginnings were figurative: portraits in the tradition of Georges Rouault, watercolors with pastel colors.

He then went through a mythological phase (gods and monsters strongly inspired by the writings of Nietzsche) before the 1940s brought a flood of incredible European talent to New York, seeking refuge from the noise of Nazi boots.

Mark ROTHKO - Art Poster: Red, White, Brown 1969 This is how a whole generation of American artists was confronted with Dali, Miro, Léger, or Ernst. The European heirs of the Blaue Reiter brought to American soil all their reflections on the abstract, the use of black lines, the importance of color as a significant element... From the strength of a Klee to the theories of a Mondrian, it's 50 years of European currents that are invading the New World! Yet it was only in 1943, at the Museum of Modern Art, that Rothko had his revelation in front of Matisse's "Red Room"!

What will now be called "multiform" was first exhibited at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1949: a huge vertical canvas, on which a rectangle of color with uncertain contours is inscribed on a lighter background. Rothko was born to the eyes of the art world, his name is now a signature. Declared the leader of what Clement Greenberg will define as "Colorfield painting," the colored fields, a movement of abstract expressionism in opposition to Pollock's "Action painting," Mark Rothko is now sufficiently recognized to begin to receive commissions (Harvard University, Houston Chapel).

The 1950s and especially the 60s saw him explore these color fields on ever more impressive formats where, he said, the rectangles with uncertain edges were nothing but "dramatic characters" since in his eyes "Art always contains evocations of mortal condition." But plagued by hypertension, which he encouraged with plenty of alcohol and cigarettes, and becoming impotent and unable to continue painting on the immense formats he loved, he ended his life on February 25, 1970. (c) Natacha PELLETIER for PASSION ESTAMPES

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