Mark Rothko, a titan among modern painters, said that the subject matter of his paintings was the extremes of human emotion. His extraordinary achievement was the communication of tragedy and elation through forms reduced to starkest simplicity—oftentimes a pair of rectangles. Born Marcus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Russia (now Daugavpils, Latvia), the artist emigrated to the United States at the age of 10. After a series of artistic metamorphoses, he established himself as a leader among New York’s artistic avant-garde in the late 1940s, in that moment when the devastation of a global war shunted creative impulses into radically new directions. Rothko died in 1970 at the age of 66. The National Gallery of Art is the largest public repository of Rothko’s works, with 1,100 works on paper and paintings on canvas and panel.
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