Markuss Rotkovičs was born in Dvinsk (now Daugavpils), Latvia, on the 25th of September 1903, but he was Russian by birth, because Latvia was part of the Russian Empire during that period. He was a descendant of an old Jewish family and his father Jacob was a pharmacist who gave his four children a secular education. Due to the frequent pogroms in Russia, Jacob returned to the orthodox Judaism and sent his youngest son Markuss to a strict Talmudic school to be trained in an traditional way. Because of the continued unfavorable situation for Jews, the father decided to emigrate to America, to wealthy family members in Portland. Markuss and his mother arrived in New York in 2013. He was 10.
In America, the Rotkovičs made a difficult start. Sonja, the older sister, took a job as a cashier and Markuss sold newspapers on the street and folded pants in the textile factory of his uncle after school. He learned to speak English and graduated seemingly effortlessly from Lincoln High School in Portland when he was 17 years old. He received a scholarship to the prestigious Yale University, but there he failed (due to racism and exclusion by the white elite) and after two years he returned to Portland and started in the Weinstein textile factory again and later he accepted a job as a teacher at a Jewish school. At about this time (1923) he came into contact with the art world and enrolled at Parsons The New School of Design. From 1928, his work was shown regularly at exhibitions of young artists. His style was influenced by the expressionism of European painters such as Paul Klee and Georges Rouault, which was problematic in a country where the art of painting was dominated by regionalist and nationalist movements that were barely interested in what was happening in Paris. New York would become the battleground between (traditionalist) American and (avant-garde) European artists.
In the mid-thirties Markuss Rotkovičs had joined The Ten, a collective that opposed the alleged equivalence of American painting. He got his first solo exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Gallery in New York and as a result of the imminent deportation of Jews in the run-up to World War II, he took American citizenship and changed his name to Mark Rothko. As the situation in Europe got out of hand, famous European painters arrived in New York, including Ernst, Miró, Tanguy, Salvador Dalí and Mondrian. The confrontation with surrealism and abstract art influenced Rothko, but American critics didn’t understand his surrealist experiments, not even Peggy Guggenheim, who was reluctant to add his mythological paintings to her collection. When she finally organized an exhibition of Mark Rothko’s work in The Art of This Century Gallery, the tone of the reviews was below expectations. Influenced by the work of his friend and colleague Clyfford Stills - he is now considered one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism – Mark Rothko turned to abstract painting.
In 1946, Rothko eventually painted his first Multi Forms (a term coined by critics, which Rothko himself never used for his style). They were exhibited at the Betty Parsons Gallery for the first time in 1949, leading to his international breakthrough.
But Mark Rothko was not an easy person. He insisted to be present when his paintings were arranged for a show and in case there was too much resistance, he often decided to abandon the project. The light in the exhibition rooms had to be exactly as he thought it should be, and he demanded that his works be put close to each other so that the public would be sucked into the paintings. He was very upset if his work was called graphic art, because his paintings were more than nice pictures on the wall. As his success grew, he started to struggle with his new status, had he not fought his whole life against the institutions who neglected his work for so long? He felt misunderstood by museums and collectors. He retreated in isolation and occasionally suffered from depression. He drank a lot, smoked like a chimney, ate badly and had heart problems. After the separation from his wife (New Year‘s day, 1969), he retired to his studio, where his assistant found him barely two months later (February 20, 1970). Mark Rothko had cut his wrists. The autopsy revealed an overdose of antidepressants. He was 66 years old.
Annie Cohen-Solal is a professor at the University of Caen (Fr.). She debuted with a biography of Jean-Paul Sartre (1988), followed by a survey of American painting (2001) and a biography of the New York gallery owner Leo Castelli (2010). In Mark Rothko she leads us through the life of what is today one of the most important representatives of Abstract Expressionism (Rothko rejected the term and called himself a colorist). Her journey begins in Latvia, in the birthplace of the painter, where she assisted the opening of the Marka Rothko Makslas Centrs (Mark Rothko Art Centre) in 2013, and she takes us through the difficult childhood of Mark Rothko in Portland, his failed career at Yale University and his decision to start painting. Cohen-Solal has done a lot of research about the life of the painter, since her biography is detailed, thorough and yet very readable for those who only marginally want to penetrate the world of painters and their paintings. That's because she focuses on the figure of Mark Rothko and tries to figure out what inspired him, what kind of man he was, why he was often difficult to deal with and demanding as his oeuvre was concerned. Conservative New York had little interest for painters from the European tradition, and it will surprise you to read that a large and reputable institution as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was barely more interested than the Whitney Museum of American Art, and only changed its mind from the moment that "real Americans" (and not a Latvian immigrant Jew) were inspired by the European tradition.
For those of you who are interested in modern art, this biography of Mark Rothko certainly is a must-read, because Annie Cohen-Solal paints a broad picture for what was going on in the American (especially New York) art world in the 30s and 40s, heavily influenced by the influx of European artists since 1933 (seizure of power by the Nazis) and the outbreak of the Second World War. Furthermore, she deals with the tension between traditional American art and European avant-garde art and the disgust of Europeans of what they called American provincial and regionalist art, which obviously had grown from a completely different tradition and therefore was regarded as inferior. Annie Cohen-Solal uses a simple and accessible narrative style and in case of a difficult subject - which of course is difficult to avoid in this regard - she uses a concise style. It might be a bridge too far to call this book the definitive biography of Mark Rothko, but the contribution of the French writer Annie Cohen-Solal certainly is a delicate and precise attempt.
ANNIE COHEN-SOLAL – Mark Rothko
English: Yale University Press (2015)
296 pag.
CritiquesAbstract