Orange and Tan

1929–1952

Teaching children at the Brooklyn Jewish Center

From 1929 Rothko taught drawing, painting and clay sculpture part-time to schoolchildren at the Center Academy of the Brooklyn Jewish Center, where he remained until 1952.

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.

1950s

The poet Stanley Kunitz

The critic Dore Ashton saw Rothko’s acquaintance with the poet Stanley Kunitz as a significant bond of these years, their conversations feeding Rothko’s enterprise; Kunitz saw him as a primitive and a shaman who finds the magic formula.

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.

1954

A Chicago show and a meeting with Sidney Janis

At a solo show at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1954 Rothko met the dealer Sidney Janis, who represented Pollock and Franz Kline; the relationship proved mutually beneficial.

1955

Branded a “sell-out”: the quarrel with Newman and Still

When Fortune magazine named a Rothko painting a good investment in 1955, Newman and Clyfford Still branded him a sell-out with bourgeois aspirations. Still asked for the paintings he had given Rothko over the years to be returned, and Rothko was deeply depressed by his former friends’ jealousy.