Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko , born Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz (Russian: Ма́ркус Я́ковлевич Ротко́вич, Latvian: Markuss Rotkovičs; name not Anglicized until 1940; September 25, 1903 – February 25, 1970), was an American abstract painter of Latvian Jewish descent. He is best known for his color pitch paintings that depicted atypical 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 allied with the American Abstract Expressionist bustle of liberal art. Originally emigrating to Portland, Oregon from Russia gone his family, Rothko later moved to New York City where his teenage period of artistic production dealt primarily with urban scenery. In acceptance to World War II, Rothko's art entered a transitional phase during the 1940s, where he experimented like mythological themes and Surrealism to freshen tragedy. Toward the fade away of the decade Rothko painted canvases bearing in mind regions of unmovable color which he other abstracted into rectangular color forms, the idiom he would use for the land of his life.

In his far along career, Rothko executed several canvases for three exchange mural projects. The Seagram murals were to have ornamented the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building, but Rothko eventually grew disgusted taking into consideration the idea that his paintings would be decorative objects for rich diners and refunded the lucrative commission, donating the paintings to museums including the Tate Modern. The Harvard Mural series was talented to a dining room in Harvard's Holyoke Center (now Smith Campus Center); their colors faded atrociously over epoch due to Rothko's use of the pigment Lithol Red together gone regular sunlight exposure. The Harvard series has before 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 with his suicide in 1970.