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"I became a painter because I wanted to raise painting to the level of poignancy of music and poetry." Born Marcus Rothkowitz in a small Russian town, Mark Rothko immigrated to Portland, Oregon, in 1913, when he was 10 years old. "You don't know what it is to be a Jewish kid dressed in a suit that is a Dvinsk, not an American, idea of a suit traveling across America and not able to speak English," he later told fellow abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell. Rothko was a weak child, an abandoned son (his father had gone to America in 1910 and died of cancer just seven months after the family was reunited), a Jew excluded from high school clubs, a Yale freshman on scholarship, and a college dropout determined to become an Artist with a capital A. James Breslin has written an exhaustive biography of the painter. He pulled together all the facts of Rothko's life and carefully examined all the strata of the artist's personality--Rothko's sensitivity, his sense of displacement, his pride and his diffidence, his combativeness, his love for his children, his hatred for Marlborough Gallery director Frank Lloyd, and his difficulties with money. The book is flawed only by Breslin's ticlike use of italics, which give the sense of the author tugging at our sleeve in an unnecessary effort to persuade: "Rothko's last and most severe renunciations were made not to remove obstacles between the observer and the idea but in a gesture of personal withdrawal." But this is a relatively minor trifle that does not unduly detract from this large--and large-spirited--book about a tormented, brilliant Artist. --Peggy Moorman
From Publishers Weekly
A hefty, bear-like man with voracious appetites, an alcoholic who withdrew into isolation and took his own life, Mark Rothko (1903-1970) made paintings that transformed despair into transcendent beauty. Breslin's biography, a splendid achievement, exorcises Rothko's private demons and explores how he invented a modern art which enacted his inner drama. Born Marcus Rothkowitz in Russia, raised in Portland, Oregon, from age 10, the painter launched an iconoclastic underground newspaper at Yale, became a "self-made proletarian" in the Depression, and progressed from expressionist urban moodscapes to surreal mythic pictures to the free-floating stacked rectangles that are his trademark. A melancholy man who never felt fully at home in his adopted country, Rothko festered with indignation as an outsider, but once he achieved fame and insider status, he felt corrupted and doomed by it, according to Breslin, a UC-Berkeley Enlgish professor and biographer of William Carlos Williams. Illustrated.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
For eight months during the winter of 1958 and the spring of 1959, Mark Rothko worked, eight hours daily, on a set of murals he had been commissioned to produce for the Four Seasons restaurant in the new Seagram Building being constructed on Park Avenue, between 52nd and 53rd Streets, in New York City. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
For eight months during the winter of 1958 and the spring of 1959, Mark Rothko worked, eight hours daily, on a set of murals he had been commissioned to produce for the Four Seasons restaurant in the new Seagram Building being constructed on Park Avenue, between 52nd and 53rd Streets, in New York City. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
For Rothko, the best a book can do,
By
This review is from: Mark Rothko: A Biography (Paperback)
No book can do Mark Rothko justice. He painted on largecanvases. To know him is to confront his original work on the wall before you. Find your distance, 10, 15, maybe 30 feet back. Yet to make sense of his colored rectangles tearing themselves apart in fission, as well as his earlier, quite different work, some background helps. Breslin's book will become the standard reference, but Still, for the motivated reader, James Breslin's bio is Finally, of the many biographies I've read, James EB different contexts is testament to the enduring value Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.3 out of 5 stars (10 customer reviews) 19 of 20 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
For Rothko, the best a book can do,
By Paul Laub - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Mark Rothko: A Biography (Paperback)
No book can do Mark Rothko justice. He painted on largecanvases. To know him is to confront his original work on the wall before you. Find your distance, 10, 15, maybe 30 feet back. Yet to make sense of his colored rectangles tearing themselves apart in fission, as well as his earlier, quite different work, some background helps. Breslin's book will become the standard reference, but Still, for the motivated reader, James Breslin's bio is Finally, of the many biographies I've read, James EB different contexts is testament to the enduring value 7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Read This Book,
By G. Snowden - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Mark Rothko: A Biography (Paperback)
I am a painter, an art professor, and a reader of biographies. I couldnt put this book down. Breslin did a magnificent job of getting inside the psyche of Rothko as a man, and as an artist. The paragraphs that describe the way in which Rothko created one of his paintings is absolutely inspired....I had goose-bumps reading it, because it seemed as if Breslin,unlike many writers who say they have observed artists, actually understood the process of creation and the passion behind it. I have never written a fan letter to a writer, but I began one to Mr.Breslin. Imagine my distress and sorrow when I read the next day in the paper that he had passed away! But this book lives as a testament to his thorough research and love of the subject. Get this book and read it....if you love art, artists, or scholarship,you will not be disappointed.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the best books on art let alone Rothko,
By Thomas Mcmanus - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Mark Rothko: A Biography (Paperback)
Only a few biographies of artists are any good. A Giacometti Portrait by James Lord and Picasso by John Richardson and Jackson Pollock by Steven Naifeh come to mind. After reading this excellent biography I must place it with these great books. I am tired of reading art critics who obscure great art rather than illuminate it. This work opens up to the layman in simple and clear writing the beauty and complexity of this modern artist in his struggle to create meaningful and profound art. In this post modernist world such ambitions are scoffed at. Irony is easy but to be profound is the most dangerous thing an artist can attempt. He risks being pompous and bombastic. But Rothko avoids these pitfalls and in the process has become one of our greatest artists. I hope you have as much fun reading this as I did. Books like this are rare. Get it.
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