Rothko: Immigrant Beginnings, Figurative Roots

Mark Rothko, Self-Portrait (1936)

Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait (1660)

Mark Rothko, Portrait of Mary (1936)

Johannes Vermeer, The Art of Painting (1666-68)

Mark Rothko, originally Markus Rothkowitz, was born in the Russian Empire (modern-day Latvia) in 1903. His family immigrated to the United States before World War I when Rothko was 10 and settled in Portland, Oregon. Rothko attended school there and graduated with honors, after which he attended Yale on scholarship for two years before dropping out due to his perception of the school’s antisemitism and classism.

Rothko did not start painting seriously until he settled in New York in 1923, where he began to take art classes with some of the leading Modernist, Cubist, and Surrealist artists of the time, including Max Weber and Arshile Gorky. 

Several of Rothko's pieces from this period show the influence of the old masters on Rothko’s style. For example, his Self-Portrait (1936, left top) calls to mind Rembrandt’s many self-portraits, and specfically his Self-Portrait (1659) at the Metropolitan, which Rothko wrote in his diaries about viewing. THe dark colour scheme of Rothko's self-portrait as well as the sculptural paint style are all influenced by the Rembrandt piece.

Siimilarly his Portrait of Mary (1938-9, left bottom) is an extremely flat and Modernist interpretation of Johannes Vermeer’s Art of Painting (1666-68), another piece Rothko mentions having viewed. While Rothko does retain Vermeer's depiction of the woman’s blue dress as well as the window next to which she stands, he changes her pose, alters her to appear possibly pregnant, and deletes the entirety of Vermeer's foreground, leaving behind just a flat depiction of the woman.

Many of Rothko's other works from the beginning of his career are Figurative pieces, as opposed to his later work in Abstract Expressionism, and display urban scenes full of isolation and emptiness – for example, the elongated and portioned-off figures in Underground Fantasy (1940, below), a piece which, with a similarity to the sculptures of Alberto Giacometti, emphasizes the white blankness of the subway background and the isolation of the individual subway riders.