Mark Rothko - 1903 – 1970

Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk.
His father, Jacob, was a pharmacist and an intellectual
who provided his children with a secular and political
rather than religious upbringing.

Unlike Jews in most cities of Czarist Russia
those in Dvinsk had been spared from violent outbreak of anti-Semitic pogroms.
However in an environment where Jews
were often blamed for many of the evils that befell Russia
Rothko’s early childhood was plagued with fear.
Fearing that his sons were about to be drafted into the Czarist army
Jacob Rothkowitz decided to emigrate from Russia to the United States.

1. A picture lives by companionship
expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer.
It dies by the same token.
It is therefore a risky and unfeeling act to send it out into the world.
How often it must be permanently impaired by the eyes of the vulgar
and the cruelty of the impotent who would extend the affliction universally.
2. I am not an abstract painter. I am not interested in the relationship between form and color. The only thing I care about is the expression of man's basic emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, destiny.
3. Certain people always say we should go back to nature. I notice they never say we should go forward to nature.
4. Pictures must be miraculous.
5. The progression of a painter's work as it travels in time from point to point will be toward clarity. Toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea and the idea and the observer.

In the June 13, 1943 edition of the New York Times, Rothko, together with Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman, published the following brief manifesto:

1. To us art is an adventure into an unknown world which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.
2. This world of imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.
3. It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.
4. We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.
5. Silence is so accurate.