Mark Rothko

"Mark Rothko (1903-1970) created a new and impassioned form of abstract painting over the course of his career. Rothko also wrote a number of essays and critical reviews during his lifetime, adding his thoughtful, intelligent, and opinionated voice to the debates of the contemporary art world. Although the artist never published a book of his varied and complex views, his heirs indicate that he occasionally spoke of the existence of such a manuscript to friends and colleagues. Stored in a warehouse since the artist's death more than thirty years ago, this manuscript, titled The Artist's Reality, is now being published for the first time." "This book discusses Rothko's ideas on the modern art world, art history, myth, beauty, the challenges of being an artist in society, the true nature of "American art," and much more The Artist's Reality also includes an introduction by Christopher Rothko, the artist's son, who describes the discovery of the manuscript and the complicated and fascinating process of bringing the manuscript to publication. The introduction is illustrated with a small selection of relevant examples of the artist's own work as well as with a reproduction of a page from the actual manuscript."--BOOK JACKET.

Mark Rothko (1903-1970) was among the greatest painters of his generation. His closest friends and colleagues were New Yorkers, and New York was the city in which he lived and worked. It is fitting, then, that the city's five largest art museums - the Brooklyn Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art - should together hold one of the richest and most varied collections of this extraordinary painter's work. This volume illustrates every work by Rothko in these great museums in glowing full-color reproductions and, in the process, surveys his entire career. Although Rothko is most famous for his luminous Color-field canvases, he also created early figurative oils and delicate surrealist fantasies in watercolor and oil.

Catalog for exhibition of Rothko's "dark paintings," which he began in 1969 and which he ended in 1970 with his death by suicide. Fifteen years later, Pace Gallery held an exhibition of fourteen of these paintings ( 29 March - 27 April 1985 ) at New York City's Pace Gallery. Pace Gallery Publications produced a superb, grey, stiff-wrapped, 9" X 12" catalog for the exhibition, with full-page reproductions of the paintings on thick glossy paper. Eminent American 20th-Century art historian Brian O'Doherty wrote a 5-page critical introduction for the catalog, and, for the frontispiece, photographer Al Mozell contributed a magnificent Karsh-like photographic portrait of Rothko. The catalog has 31 numbered pages, one unumbered (second) photographic page, and stiff black endpapers.

"Mark Rothko was not only one of the most influential American painters of the twentieth century; he was a scholar, an educator, and a deeply spiritual human being. Born Marcus Yakovlevich Rotkovitch, he emigrated from the Russian Empire to the United States at age ten, already well educated in the Talmud and carrying with him bitter memories of the pogroms and persecutions visited upon the Jews of Latvia. Few artists have achieved success as quickly, and by the mid-twentieth century, Rothko's artwork was being displayed in major museums throughout the world. In May 2012 his painting Orange, Red, Yellow was auctioned for nearly $87 million, setting a new Christie's record. Author Annie Cohen-Solal gained access to archival materials no previous biographer had seen. As a result, her book is an extraordinarily detailed portrait of Rothko the man and the artist, an uncommonly successful painter who was never comfortable with the idea of his art as a commodity"--