Mark Rothko: The Spirit of Myth

The painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970), a foremost abstract expressionist, is best known for his large canvases filled with rectangles of intense color, the product of his mature style. How this major 20th-century American artist's work evolved from previous stages of search and experimentation can be traced in Mark Rothko: The Spirit of Myth, an exhibition of 24 rarely seen early paintings from the 1930s and 1940s and a later work from 1951.

The Russian-born artist who emigrated to the United States with his family when he was 10 grew up in Portland, Oregon, and came East to attend Yale University, where he studied briefly. He moved to New York in 1923, attending classes at the Art Students League and supporting himself by teaching art to children, an experience he said taught him invaluable lessons about the creative process.

Rothko's early paintings depicted aspects of city life and the loneliness and alienation of the individual in modern Western society. Illustrative of this period are "Street Scene" (1936/1939), "Subway" (1936/1939) and other, untitled paintings. Works created at the end of the 1930's show his dissatisfaction with the ability of the human figure to represent the anguish of modern life.

Influenced by Surrealism and Friedrich Nietzsche's "Birth of Tragedy," he began to explore the themes of Greco-Roman myths, inspired not by the stories so much as by the "spirit of myth." Hybrid figures, combinations of decorative and architectural elements and human and animal body parts in stratified compositions recalling Roman sarcophagi, characterize this period. Studies in natural science and in the automatism of the Surrealists, a technique designed to promote the expression of the subconscious mind, inform the calligraphic style and biomorphic figures in "Memory" (1945/1946) . The background of "Untitled" (1945/1946) recalls geological diagrams or submarine worlds.

Rothko's early work was the focus of an undergraduate seminar in Columbia's Department of Art History and Archaeology taught by Professor Johanna Drucker, and the exhibition's introduction and labels were prepared by students Michelle Alumkal, Nancy Frey, Meredith Hughes, Gordana Jelisijevic, Jenelle Porter, Kate Pratter and Marlena Sonn.

Works included in the exhibition were selected by Jack Cowart and Jeremy Strick of the Department of 20th-Century Art from the 195 paintings and 770 drawings donated to the National Gallery in 1986 by The Mark Rothko Foundation.