Mark Rothko
Rectangles of colour that hover, painted by a man who insisted they were about tragedy, not decoration.
Mark Rothko was born Markus Rothkowitz at Dvinsk in the Russian Empire in 1903 and emigrated to Portland, Oregon, at ten. He painted figures and then mythological and surrealist subjects before arriving, around 1949, at the format he kept: two or three soft-edged rectangles of colour stacked on a ground, painted in thin washes so the layers show through one another. He refused to explain them as abstractions and rejected the Seagram commission rather than let the paintings hang in a restaurant, giving them instead to the Tate. He took his own life in 1970.
The technique creates the central problem. Rothko used thin layers of oil, egg, resin and unstable pigments on unprimed canvas, and the paintings are physically delicate: they are matte and absorbent, cannot be varnished or cleaned conventionally, and several are known to have darkened or faded, most publicly the Harvard murals. Condition history and any past restoration are therefore fundamental rather than incidental. Works on paper are numerous and equally fragile. The catalogue raisonne and the estate are the references, and the Rothko forgery scandal at Knoedler is recent history.
If you own a work by Mark Rothko
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