Marcus Rothkowitz, who is commonly known as Mark Rothko, was born in 1903 in Dvinsk, Russia. He was born to a Jewish family, which immigrated to Portland, Oregon in 1913. Rothko’s father died months after their immigration. Rothko was a good in studies and won a scholarship to Yale, where he fared well and discovered his leftist political inclinations. He dropped out of the college and went to New York. It was in New York, that he decided to become an artist. In New York, he enrolled at the Art Students League and studied under Max Weber. There he studied about Cubism, Matisse and the German Expressionists.

Drawing inspirations from Milton Avery and Matisse, he created paintings in the 1930s. It was in 1940 that he changed his last name to Rothko. By the mid-1940s, he was exploring surrealism and created some modern art paintings that were inspired by classical methods. He appointed those paintings as symbols to confer human tragedy. He also copied Joan Miro and Max Ernst, and created some marvelous abstract art paintings. He and his friend, Adolph Gottlieb, were studying Nietzsche and Jung at the time, and discerning about the unconscious. With widespread Fascism in Europe and World War II in progress, Rothko and other artists were of the opinion that following artistic traditions at such time was not only inapt, but immature. Rothko desired to answer the bigger questions, and he was striving to find his own unique way to do that. He started creating large, flat and misty areas of color. His paintings became more and more minimal, simplified and pattern oriented until he started creating completely abstract art in 1947. By 1950, he had found his gridlock, and then he just kept on repeating it. He repeated same thing from 1949 until his death in 1970.

Rothko’s abstract paintings were completely new. Before 1950s, colors were typically associated with narrative content; but Rothko was demanding that color alone should be able to draw out emotions. For him, it was a very useful and apparently infinite structure within which he said he could experience and deal with human emotions and drama. In his modern art paintings, he got rid of anything and everything that triggered history, reminiscence, narrative or even geometry and created an overwhelming sensory environment for the observers through monumentality, straightforwardness, and even stillness.

Art lovers who have experienced the works of Rothko often described standing before his paintings as an enriching religious experience. He would apply coatings of color to build hues so deep and extravagant that they appeared to glow; something Renaissance genius like Titian did excessively. The balance and proportion of Rothko’s works link them to religious paintings.

Rothko was not only deeply troubled, but he was also a depressive man, who took his work seriously and dedicated a great deal of time and focus to create his works of art. In 1969, he gave some paintings to the Tate museum. He strictly controlled the environment of his paintings and demanded that they should be shown in low lights, cluster, faced at close quarters, and never displayed with works by other artists. He did this not to be problematic, but because he cared deeply that the viewers should have an immersive transcendent experience. He wanted to give the viewers the experience that they were not looking at the paintings, but they were with them and within them. More than anything, Rothko, with his collection of modern art paintings, wanted to make his viewers experience something to bump into the undefinable, to gaze into the void, and to meet with the universal human tragedy.