Mark Rothko: A Biography - Hardcover

Breslin, James E. B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226074056 ISBN 13: 9780226074054

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1993

Synopsis

The definitive biography of one of the most-loved artists of the twentieth century, a book the New York Times called "the best life of an American painter yet written"

A book of heroic dimensions, this is the first full-length biography of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century—a man as fascinating, difficult, and compelling as the paintings he produced. Drawing on exclusive access to Mark Rothko's personal papers and over one hundred interviews with artists, patrons, and dealers, James Breslin tells the story of a life in art—the personal costs and professional triumphs, the convergence of genius and ego, the clash of culture and commerce. Breslin offers us not only an enticing look at Rothko as a person, but delivers a lush, in-depth portrait of the New York art scene of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s—the world of Abstract Expressionism, of Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, and Klein, which would influence artists for generations to come.

 

About this title

About the Author

James E. B. Breslin (1935-1996) was a professor of English and chair of the Department of Art Practice at the University of California at Berkeley, where he served on the faculty for thirty-two years.

His lifelong interest as a scholar lay in twentieth century American poetry and art. His first book was William Carlos Williams: An American Artist, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1970. This was followed by From Modern to Contemporary, which the Press published in 1984. Mark Rothko: A Biography, which the Press first released in 1993 is his best-known book, and marked a turn from poetry to American painting at its most radical moment: the emergence of Abstract Expressionism, displayed and explored in the career and life of one of its masters.

Reviews

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.

The full-bodied fruit of seven years' labor--a zealous, uncommonly kind portrait of one of Abstract Expressionism's irascible masters--from Breslin (William Carlos Williams, 1970). Marcus Rothkowitz, born in 1903 in the Russian city of Dvinsk, emigrated with his family in 1913 to Portland, Oregon. Rebellious as a youth, he dropped out of Yale after a taste of refined Eastern anti-Semitism, turning instead to Manhattan and the painter's life. Impoverished, Rothko lived in a series of cold-water flats and run- down neighborhoods during the Depression and WW II, often confronting the city's museum establishment, which then had eyes only for European art. The painter's first wife's money demands--as well as the success of her jewelry business, which turned him at times into her salesman--resulted in divorce; but with remarriage in 1945 to the young, adoring Mell, Rothko came to be seen as one of a distinctly American group of artists. In the late 1940's, he embraced the abstract luminous colors and rectangular forms that became his trademark, and, in the hands of aggressive dealers, he went rapidly from rags to riches. Still defiant, he returned, after two years' work, a commission to paint panels for the celebrated Four Seasons restaurant when he realized that his efforts could be only decorative. Other commissions followed, but Rothko's colors darkened as his health and marriage deteriorated. In 1970, in despair and pressured by his dealer to sell more paintings, he committed suicide. Providing an expansive view of Rothko and his milieu, and rich in information about the New York art scene--but a breathless enthusiasm for his subject leads Breslin to descriptive excess, especially with regard to individual paintings. (Color & b&w illustrations) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226074056
• ISBN 13: 9780226074054
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 707