Rothko refunded a rich commission rather than decorate diners' walls
Stacked rectangles of colour that seem lit from within made Mark Rothko famous, yet he gave back a lucrative fee rather than let his canvases decorate the Four Seasons restaurant for wealthy diners. The Latvian-born painter (1903–1970) lived modestly for most of his life; decades after his suicide, one picture fetched $186 million.
Pale of Settlement childhood under a Marxist pharmacist father ended with Ellis Island arrival in late 1913 and Portland settlement; Jacob's colon cancer death months later pushed young Markus through warehouse and newspaper work and a vow to quit synagogues after a year of mourning. Lincoln High honors at seventeen, IWW meetings with Bill Haywood and Emma Goldman, and a Yale scholarship that vanished after year one preceded satirical magazine work and a drop-out from what he found elitist and racist.
Garment-district days in 1923 flipped when he glimpsed a life class sketching at the Art Students League; Parsons, Max Weber, and Milton Avery's circle with Gottlieb steered him from urban scenes through mythic Surrealism toward pure color regions by decade's end. Brooklyn Jewish Center teaching for twenty-plus years steadied income. The Seagram canvases went instead to museums including the Tate; Harvard's lithol red series bleached in sun before lighting restoration; Houston's non-denominational chapel keeps fourteen canvases in permanent hush.
His mature method, visible in two untitled canvases of 1953, was to stain the fabric with many thin washes and watch closely where neighbouring fields meet, so that light appears to come off the picture itself. He wanted painting to work like music, a doorway onto the spiritual, and described his goal as clearing every obstacle between painter, idea and viewer. He joined no school, though he is grouped with the American Abstract Expressionists.
In the early 1930s he fell in with Milton Avery's circle, including Gottlieb and Barnett Newman, painting by day and arguing by night at Lake George and Gloucester; on a 1932 Lake George trip he met the jewellery designer Edith Sachar and married her that year. His first solo show, at the Portland Art Museum the next summer, hung drawings by his young Brooklyn pupils beside his own. In 1935 he co-founded The Ten to protest the idea that American painting meant literal painting, and like Pollock and de Kooning he drew wages from the Works Progress Administration.
Source: Mark Rothko
