Untitled

1948

Rothko’s mother dies

Rothko’s mother, Kate, died in October 1948; the discovery of his definitive form came at a period of great distress.

1948–1949

The “Subjects of the Artist” school

In 1948 Rothko, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Barnett Newman and David Hare founded the Subjects of the Artist school at 35 East 8th Street, with public lectures by Jean Arp, John Cage and Ad Reinhardt; it failed financially and closed in the spring of 1949. Besides teaching, Rothko began writing for the new magazines Tiger’s Eye and Possibilities.

early 1949

New paintings at Parsons: a “revelation”

After painting his first multiform Rothko shut himself away at his house in East Hampton and invited only a select few, among them the critic Harold Rosenberg, to see the new paintings. In early 1949 he showed them at the Betty Parsons Gallery, where Rosenberg found them nothing short of a revelation.

1949–1956

Large vertical canvases: being “inside” the picture

For seven years Rothko painted in oil only on large vertical canvases so that the viewer would feel “enveloped within” the painting. Critics saw this as compensating for a lack of substance; he replied that he painted large because he wanted to be intimate, and advised viewers to stand as close as eighteen inches away.

1950

The “Irascibles” photograph: a protest against the Met

In 1950 a conservative jury rejected paintings by the radical group to which Rothko belonged for a major exhibition of modern art at the Metropolitan Museum. In reply the artists posed for a group photograph of the “Irascibles”, all stern-faced, with Rothko especially angry.

1952

“Fifteen Americans” and a quarrel with Newman

Dorothy Canning Miller’s Fifteen Americans at MoMA formally heralded the abstract artists, but it also set Rothko against Barnett Newman, who accused him of trying to exclude him from the show.