Born in Daugavpils, Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, Rothko and his family emigrated to the United States, arriving at Ellis Island in late 1913 and originally settling in Portland, Oregon.

In response to World War II, Rothko's art entered a transitional phase during the 1940s, where he experimented with mythological themes and Surrealism to express tragedy.

[13]Rothko and a friend, Aaron Director, started a satirical magazine, The Yale Saturday Evening Pest, that lampooned the school's stuffy, bourgeois tone.

[24] During the early 1930s, Rothko met Adolph Gottlieb, who, along with Barnett Newman, Joseph Solman, Louis Schanker, and John Graham, was part of a group of young artists surrounding the painter Milton Avery.

[26] Rothko, Gottlieb, Newman, Solman, Graham, and their mentor, Avery, spent considerable time together, vacationing at Lake George, New York, and Gloucester, Massachusetts.

"[36] Later, in 1938, a show was held at the Mercury Gallery in New York, intended as a protest against the Whitney Museum of American Art, which the group regarded as having a provincial, regionalist agenda.

[43] In Rothko's mature or "classic" period (1951–1970), he consistently painted rectangular regions of color, intended as "dramas"[44] to elicit an emotional response from the viewer.

He allegedly stopped painting altogether in 1940, to immerse himself in reading Sir James Frazer's study of mythology The Golden Bough, and Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams.

He believed that this emptiness resulted partly from lack of mythology,[citation needed] which, according to Nietzsche, "The images of the myth have to be the unnoticed omnipresent demonic guardians, under whose care the young soul grows to maturity and whose signs help the man to interpret his life and struggles.

[62] In 1942, following the success of shows by Ernst, Miró, Wolfgang Paalen, Tanguy, and Salvador Dalí, artists who had immigrated to the United States because of the war, Surrealism took New York by storm.

[citation needed] In the middle of this crucial period of transition, Rothko had been impressed by Clyfford Still's abstract fields of color, which were influenced in part by the landscapes of Still's native North Dakota.

Well-attended lectures there were open to the public, with speakers such as Jean Arp, John Cage, and Ad Reinhardt, but the school failed financially and closed in the spring of 1949.

These articles reflect the elimination of figurative elements from his painting, and a specific interest in the new contingency debate launched by Wolfgang Paalen's Form and Sense publication of 1945.

Rothko happened upon the use of symmetrical rectangular blocks of two to three opposing or contrasting, yet complementary, colors, in which, for example, "the rectangles sometimes seem barely to coalesce out of the ground, concentrations of its substance.

[citation needed] As Rothko achieved success, he became increasingly protective of his works, turning down several potentially important sales and exhibition opportunities: A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer.

Electron microscopy and ultraviolet analysis conducted by the MOLAB showed that he employed natural substances such as egg and glue, as well as artificial materials including acrylic resins, phenol formaldehyde, modified alkyd, and others.

The 1952 "Fifteen Americans" show curated by Dorothy Canning Miller at the Museum of Modern Art formally heralded the abstract artists and included works by Jackson Pollock and William Baziotes.

[110] For Rothko, this Seagram murals commission presented a new challenge, since it was the first time he was required not only to design a coordinated series of paintings but to produce an artwork space concept for a large, specific interior.

While on the SS Independence he disclosed to journalist John Fischer, who was publisher of Harper's Magazine, that his true intention for the Seagram murals was to paint "something that will ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room".

He hoped, he told Fischer, that his painting would make the restaurant's patrons "feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall".

They then traveled to Somerset and stayed with the artist William Scott, who was just starting a large mural project, and they discussed the respective issues of public and private sponsorship.

Upset with the restaurant's dining atmosphere, which he considered pretentious and inappropriate for the display of his works, Rothko refused to continue the project and returned his cash advance to the Seagram and Sons Company.

Given that Rothko had known in advance about the luxury decor of the restaurant, and the social class of its future patrons, the motives for his abrupt repudiation remain mysterious, although he did write to his friend William Scott in England, "Since we had discussed our respective murals I thought you might be interested to know that mine are still with me.

"[117] The final series of Seagram Murals was dispersed, and now hangs in three locations: London's Tate Britain, Japan's Kawamura Memorial Museum, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.[118] This episode was the main basis for John Logan's 2009 play Red.

[124] The murals were on display from November 16, 2014, to July 26, 2015, in the newly renovated Harvard Art Museums, for which the fading of the pigments has been compensated by using an innovative color projection system to illuminate the paintings.

Architect Philip Johnson, unable to compromise with Rothko's vision about the kind of light he wanted in the space, left the project in 1967 and was replaced by Howard Barnstone and Eugene Aubry.

On February 28, 1971, at the dedication, Dominique de Menil said, "We are cluttered with images and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine", noting Rothko's courage in painting "impenetrable fortresses" of color.

[130] But Rothko did take the medical advice not to paint pictures taller than three feet, and turned his attention to smaller, less physically strenuous formats, including acrylics on paper.

[132] On February 25, 1970, Oliver Steindecker, Rothko's assistant, found the artist lying dead on the kitchen floor in front of the sink, covered in blood.

[143] A previously unpublished manuscript by Rothko, The Artist's Reality (2004), about his philosophies on art, edited by his son Christopher, was published by Yale University Press.