Mark Rothko valuation
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.
What a work by Mark Rothko is worth
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Bio
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.
The two catalogues
Rothko is covered by two catalogues raisonnés, both connected with the National Gallery of Art in Washington. David Anfam's catalogue of the works on canvas, published in 1998, records the paintings on canvas and panel. The works on paper, which will eventually number about 2,600, are recorded in a separate online catalogue the Gallery launched in 2019; it is free to search and is completed as research continues.
Between them they are the first check for anything offered as a Rothko. A work absent from both needs a very good explanation, and the Knoedler case showed how convincing an invented history can be. Posters after the paintings are common and are reproductions, whatever the frame suggests.
Portland, The Ten and the Brooklyn Jewish Center
Rothko arrived at Ellis Island with his mother and sister late in 1913 and crossed the country to join the rest of the family in Portland, where he graduated from Lincoln High School with honours in 1921. A scholarship took him to Yale, where with Aaron Director he started a satirical magazine, The Yale Saturday Evening Pest; he left after two years and returned only to receive an honorary degree 46 years later. In New York in 1923, visiting a friend at the Art Students League, he saw students drawing from a model, which he called the start of his life as an artist, and he went on to study with Max Weber and, at Parsons, with Arshile Gorky.
From 1929, for more than twenty years, he taught children drawing, painting and clay modelling at the Center Academy of the Brooklyn Jewish Center, and his first one-person show, at the Portland Art Museum in 1933, hung his pupils' work beside his own. Milton Avery's circle, with Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman, was his school in the early 1930s. In 1935 he was a founder of The Ten, and like Gorky, Pollock and de Kooning he worked for the Works Progress Administration. The fourteen canvases of the Rothko Chapel in Houston are a permanent installation, and the Harvard murals, which faded because of the lithol red in them, are now shown under compensating light.
Best auction results
- Orange, Red, Yellow $86.9m
- Oil on canvas, 1961 · New York · 8 May 2012
- Publicly reported
- From the collection of David and Geraldine Pincus.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
