Mark Rothko was born on September 25, 1903. Rothko and his family immigrated to the United States when he was 10 years old, and settled in Portland, Oregon. Rothko attended Yale University in 1921, where he studied English, French, European history, elementary mathematics, physics, biology, economics, the history of philosophy, and general psychology. His initial intention was to become an engineer or an attorney. Rothko gave up his studies in the fall of 1923 and moved to New York City. Alternately radiant and dark, Rothko's art is distinguished by a rare degree of sustained concentration on pure pictorial properties such as color, surface, proportion, and scale, accompanied by the conviction that those elements could disclose the presence of a high philosophical truth. Visual elements such as luminosity, darkness, broad space, and the contrast of colors have been linked, by the artist himself as well as other commentators, to profound themes such as tragedy, ecstasy, and the sublime.
Rothko was one of the leading proponents of Color Field painting, a type of non-gestural Abstract Expressionism that entailed large-scale canvases distinguished by monumental expanses of form and tone. By 1947, Rothko had abandoned representational imagery altogether and began working with color, light, and space as the fundamental elements in his compositions. In the following years, he continued to emphasize color as the defining force, transitioning to the mature, Color Field paintings now on display at the Art Institute. Rothko wanted to offer painting as a doorway into purely spiritual realms, in order to communicate directly the most essential, rawest forms of human emotion. Materially speaking, he achieved this by directly staining the fabric of the canvas with many thin washes of pigment and by paying particular attention to the edges where the fields interact. The effect is remarkable and profoundly moving: the light seems to radiate from the image itself, projecting vibrant colors into space and suspending the rectangular forms in time.
