From 1921 to 1923, he attended Yale University. In 1924, he joined the Art Student’s League in New York and was strongly influenced by the Russian-American Expressionist painter Max Weber. His move to New York became permanent in 1925 and art captured his imagination. Music and philosophy nurtured his soul, but he became devoted to painting. “I became a painter because I wanted to raise painting to the level of poignancy of music and poetry.” Although he studied at leading institutions, he was largely self-taught as an artist and a thinker. He became part of an exceptional generation of artists who, after World War II, became known as the New York School or the Abstract Expressionists.

It wasn’t until the late 1940’s that Rothko developed his own abstract style, blurred-edge rectangular frames of a single hue set in a field of color. Labels and categories bothered Rothko and he insisted that “… I’m not an abstractionist… I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions… the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.”

After a number of important exhibits in the 1950’s, critic Thomas Hess wrote in reference to the exhibit at the Janis Gallery in New York, “the show re-emphasized the international importance of Rothko as a leader of postwar modern art.” By 1958, Rothko had achieved stunning acclaim and was chosen to represent the United States in painting at the Venice Biennale.

The somber, darker colors appeared in Rothko’s work by the late 1950’s and he longed for his art to be shown in a unified space. He was dissatisfied with the conventional way of exhibiting works of art and the conditions of the art environment.

Mark Rothko was commissioned in 1964 by the de Menils and was given the unique opportunity to shape and control a total environment to encompass a group of fourteen paintings he especially created for this meditative space. This was exactly what he longed for and in a letter of January 1, 1966 to the de Menils, he wrote: “the magnitude, on every level of experience and meaning, of the task in which you have involved me, exceeds all my preconceptions. And it is teaching me to extend myself beyond what I thought was possible for me. For this I thank you.”

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