Mark Rothko

Markus Rothkowitz was sent to cheder at five, alone among four children, after a father he later called violently anti-religious returned to Orthodoxy. The family left Dvinsk because the older boys were about to be conscripted, and Markus, his mother and sister came through Ellis Island late in 1913 and crossed to Portland. Jacob Rothkowitz died of colon cancer a few months after they arrived, and the household had no income. His sister worked a cash register, the boy sold newspapers in an uncle's warehouse, and after mourning his father at a Portland synagogue for nearly a year he vowed never to set foot in one again. He finished Lincoln High with honors at 17, lost his Yale scholarship, and left in his sophomore year.

New York, autumn 1923: garment district work, a visit to a friend at the Art Students League, students sketching a model, and what he called the start of his life as an artist. He studied under Max Weber, who taught him to treat paint as religious expression, and fell in with Milton Avery, who showed him a person could live at it. For 20 years he taught children drawing and clay at the Brooklyn Jewish Center to pay for it. He worked through urban interiors, then myth, then Surrealist hybrids, and around 1949 arrived at what he painted for 21 years: soft-edged rectangles of color stacked on enormous canvases. He rejected abstractionist as a label, and colorist too. The subject, he insisted, was tragedy, ecstasy and doom, and he counted the people who wept before the pictures as proof.

In 1958 Seagram paid him to fill the Four Seasons restaurant in its new Park Avenue tower. He produced 40 paintings in three months, turned his format vertical to answer the room, and went to Florence to study the vestibule of Michelangelo's Laurentian Library. On the crossing home he told a magazine publisher that he wanted to ruin the appetite of every diner in that room and leave them butting their heads against the walls. Then he visited the finished restaurant, refused to continue, and gave back the advance. He never fully explained it. By the Houston chapel, which he meant as his largest statement, an aortic aneurysm had left him unable to paint at that scale, and assistants applied every layer of paint on half the canvases while he supervised. Finishing them, he said, was torment.

His assistant found him on the studio kitchen floor on February 25, 1970, dead of barbiturates and a cut artery, with no note. The Seagram paintings reached the Tate in London that same day. His estranged wife Mell, also a heavy drinker, died six months later at 48. Then his own financial adviser and two co-executors sold the estate's paintings cheap to the Marlborough Gallery and split the proceeds, and his 19-year-old daughter Kate sued. The case ran more than a decade. In 1975 the executors and the gallery were removed and ordered to pay 9.2 million dollars, and 658 unsold paintings came back. A Rothko sold at auction in 2014 for 186 million.

Mark Rothko's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Yale Saturday Evening Pest other
  A satirical magazine started with Aaron Director to mock the college's bourgeois tone 1923
• Black on Maroon artwork
  One of the Seagram canvases. Defaced with marker at Tate Modern in 2012. The repair took 18 months. 1958
• Seagram murals artwork
  Forty paintings for the Four Seasons. He returned the fee and gave them to museums instead. 1959
• Harvard Murals artwork
  Five panels for the Holyoke Center. The lithol red faded badly and they went into dark storage. 1963
• Rothko Chapel building
  Fourteen canvases in a windowless octagon in Houston. He never saw it finished. 1971
• The Artist's Reality book
  A manuscript on his philosophy of art, unpublished for decades and edited by his son Christopher 2004

• 1913 aged ~10 Arrives at Ellis Island with his mother and sister and crosses to Portland His father and older brothers had gone ahead to escape conscription.
• 1914 aged ~11 His father dies of colon cancer months after the family is reunited Rothko mourned at a synagogue for nearly a year and then left religion behind.
• 1923 aged ~20 Watches students draw a model at the Art Students League and starts painting He had dropped out of Yale and moved to New York earlier that year.
• 1929 aged ~26 Begins teaching children at the Brooklyn Jewish Center, where he stayed 20 years
• February 21, 1938 aged 34 Becomes a United States citizen He shortened Rothkowitz to Rothko around this period.
• 1949 aged ~46 Settles on the stacked color rectangles he would paint for 21 years
• 1958 aged ~55 Takes the Seagram commission, then refuses it and returns the money
• 1968 aged ~65 Diagnosed with an aortic aneurysm and told to stop painting large He kept drinking and smoking and turned to acrylics on paper.
• February 25, 1970 aged 66 Found dead on his studio kitchen floor at 66 Barbiturates and a cut artery. There was no note.

• Emma Goldman 1869–1940
  Anarchist orator and editor whose free-speech and birth-control agitation led to her 1919 deportation. heard her speak in Portland
• Bill Haywood 1869–1928
  Co-founded the Industrial Workers of the World and led major mining and textile strikes. heard him speak in Portland
• Jasper Johns b. 1930
  Painter and printmaker whose Flag and Target paintings bridged Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. dismissed his flags
• Nelson Rockefeller 1908–1979
  Governor and unelected vice president whose drug laws set the template for mass incarceration. collected by his family
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. sat beside his father at the 1961 inaugural ball