Mark Rothko (Sept. 25, 1903 - Feb. 25, 1970) is an American painter of Russian Jewish descent. Although Rothko himself refused to adhere to any art movement, he is generally identified as an abstract expressionist. With Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, he is one of the most famous postwar American artists.

Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Vitebsk Governorate, in the Russian Empire (today Daugavpils in Latvia). His father, Jacob (Yakov) Rothkowitz, was a pharmacist and an intellectual who initially provided his children with a secular and political, rather than religious, upbringing. In an environment where Jews were often blamed for many of the evils that befell Russia, Rothko's early childhood was plagued by fear. Despite Jacob Rothkowitz's modest income, the family was highly educated, and Rothko was able to speak Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew.

Fearing that his elder sons were about to be drafted into the Imperial Russian Army, Jacob Rothkowitz emigrated from Russia to the United States. Markus remained in Russia with his mother and elder sister Sonia. Later, they joined Jacob and the elder brothers in Portland, Oregon, arriving at Ellis Island in late 1913. His father's death also led Rothko to sever his ties with religion. After he had mourned his father's death for almost a year at a local synagogue, he vowed never set foot in it again.

Like his father, Rothko was passionate about such issues as workers' rights and women's right to contraception. Portland at the time was the epicentre of revolutionary activity in the US, and the area where the revolutionary syndicalist union the Industrial Workers of the World, was strongest.

Markus, having grown up around radical workers' meetings, attended meetings of the IWW with other anarchists like Bill Haywood and Emma Goldman, where he developed strong oratorical skills he would later use in defence of Surrealism. He heard activist Emma Goldman speak on one of her West Coast lecture tours. With the onset of the Russian Revolution, Rothko organised debates about it in an atmosphere of extreme repression and wished to become a union organiser.

Rothko received a scholarship to Yale. At the end of his freshman year, the scholarship was not renewed, and he worked as a waiter and delivery boy to support his studies. He found the Yale community to be elitist and racist. Rothko and a friend, Aaron Director, started a satirical magazine, The Yale Saturday Evening Pest, which lampooned the school's stuffy, bourgeois tone. In any event, Rothko's nature was always more that of the self-taught man than the diligent pupil: "One of his fellow students remembers that he hardly seemed to study, but that he was a voracious reader." At the end of his sophomore year, Rothko dropped out and did not return until he was awarded an honorary degree forty-six years later.

EARLY CAREER

In the autumn of 1923, Rothko found work in New York's garment district. While visiting a friend at the Art Students League of New York, he saw students sketching a model. According to Rothko, this was the beginning of his life as an artist. He later enrolled in the Parsons The New School for Design, where one of his instructors was the artist and class monitor Arshile Gorky. This was probably his first encounter with a member of the American avant-garde, though the two men never became close, given Gorky's dominating nature. (Rothko referred to Gorky's leadership in the class as "overcharged with supervision.") That autumn, he took courses at the Art Students League taught by the Cubist artist Max Weber, a fellow Russian Jew. To his students eager to know about Modernism, Weber, who had been a part of the French avant-garde, was seen as "a living repository of modern art history." Under Weber's tutelage, Rothko began to view art as a tool of emotional and religious expression, and Rothko's paintings from this era reveal the influence of his instructor. Years later, when Weber attended a show of his former student's work and expressed his admiration, Rothko was immensely pleased.