Mark Rothko is noted for being only second to Jackson Pollock as the great abstract expressionist of the 1950s. Rothko was born in Russia in 1903. His family immigrated to the United States in 1913. At Yale University he was a liberal arts major. At the Art Students League in New York, Rothko studied various areas of art. In the 1930s, Rothko became a painter in the abstract expressionist group. He married his second wife in 1945 and had two children. Rothko committed suicide in 1970.
Rothko's paintings are known for their spiritual quality which parallels the holy ideals of the beat writers of the 1950s. Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and Jack Kerouac are beat writers whose poetry and prose contains elements of holiness. The abstraction in Rothko's paintings is like the imagery that the beat writers produced in their work. Rothko's abstractness is described as "express[ing] the human tensions which persist through time in present terms" (Cavaliere 1002). The beat writers were expressing tensions they were facing in their contemporary 1950s culture such as fear of the cold war and being seen as delinquents from a mainstream society.
-Amy Nichols (Cerrito, Joahn. Contemporary Artists. New York: St. James Press, 1996.)
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