Mark Rothko
Artist
Biography
Mark Rothko (1903–1970) was a Latvian-born American painter and a pioneer of the New York School. Born in Dvinsk in the Russian Empire, he emigrated to the United States as a child. After figurative and then mythic, biomorphic work in the 1930s and 1940s, he arrived at the Color Field paintings for which he is best known: large canvases, produced from 1949 until his death, in which soft-edged rectangles of luminous, layered color seem to float on the surface. Rothko held that painting could communicate basic human emotions and offer a profound psychological and spiritual experience. Although he did not subscribe to any single school, he is closely associated with Abstract Expressionism.