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Mark Rothko, American (1903-1970)
Untitled, 1949
Oil on unprimed canvas, 85 1/8 x 63 1/8 inches
Bequest of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.
©1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Mark Rothko was one of the most influential members of the Abstract Expressionist movement in 1950s New York and a key figure in the genesis of American color field painting. Born Marcus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Russia, Rothko immigrated to the United States at the age of ten and settled with his family in Ptortland, Oregon. In 1924, after a period of academic study at Yale University, he moved to New York with plans to become an artist. Though he sporadically attended classes at the Art Students League-his studies with the Expressionist painter Max Weber were formative-he was largely self-taught and developed his craft by studying the art of contemporaries like Milton Avery, whose paintings of reductive forms and broad color masses were important for his future development.

During the early decades of his career-from the mid-1920s to the late 1940s-Rothko worked his way through a succession of modernist styles that carried him inexorably toward abstraction and an ever-purer expression of his art's central theme: the essential tragedy of the human condition. His first paintings were representational subjects-genre scenes, portraits, landscapes, and still lifes-executed in an Expressionist style. These bleak depictions of lonely city dwellers and haunted urban spaces gave way in the early 1940s to a series of semi-abstract pictographic paintings featuring a complex vocabulary of mysterious, archaic-looking symbols. Influenced by European Surrealism and Jungian psychoanalysis, these works were intended to convey the dark, primordial emotions embedded in ancient myth.

The turning point for Rothko came in the late 1940s as he moved rapidly toward full abstraction, abandoning his Surrealist pictographs to focus on purely nonobjective images of amorphous, blurred blocks of color. As he relinquished all vestiges of traditional subject matter, he also gave up descriptive titles, identifying his works chiefly by numbers. By 1949, as seen in important transitional canvases like the Chrysler's No. 5 (Untitled), he had reached the threshold of his definitive style. From this point on, color alone would be the bearer of meaning and emotion for Rothko.

Composed of vaporous, rectangular color fields stacked weightlessly atop one another and floating against an indeterminate ground, No. 5 directly anticipates Rothko's classic abstract formats of the 1950s. The painting's uniformly somber palette of deep blue, gray-brown, and black is somewhat unusual; most paintings of the period feature brighter fields of red, orange, and yellow. Rothko himself contended that darker colors conveyed the tragic state of human existence more successfully than brighter hues.

Rothko documented his transition from Surrealist imagery to color abstraction in a series of influential one-man shows mounted between 1947 and 1951 at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York. He included No. 5 in the January 1950 show and again in the April 1951 exhibition. (Photographs by Aaron Siskind show Rothko and Parsons seated in the 1950 installation, with No. 5 visible on the wall to their right.)

During the 1950s Rothko became increasingly reluctant to explicate his work, fearing that words would only "paralyze" the viewer's mind. But in 1957 he famously proclaimed that he "was not an abstractionist. . . . I'm not interested in the relationship of color to form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotion-tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.... The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them."

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