"I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on." - Mark Rothko

Born Marcus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk in the former Russian Empire, Mark Rothko was one of the towering figures of one of the most enduring American art movements, Abstract Expressionism. Having a relatively late start as an artist, he decided to pursue painting in his twenties when he studied at the Art Students League of New York and the New School of Design with Arshile Gorky. In his early canvases, Rothko painted figurative scenes of New York life in the 1930s and explored the mythological, Jungian surrealism that many of his peers, like Jackson Pollock, were experimenting with in their work. Rothko is best known however, for the floating, dissolving rectangular shapes that characterized the signature style of his mature phase, begun in the late 1940s. He continued to paint these essential forms with an increasingly darkening palette until his suicide in 1970. Rothko was ambivalent about the overwhelming success that he achieved in his lifetime, which included major commissions like the Rothko Chapel in Houston and a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.

Watch a video of the artist's work accompanied by Morton Feldman's musical composition "Rothko Chapel" (1970):