Mark Rothko (19031970), a titan among modern painters, said that the subject matter of his paintings was the extremes of human emotion. His extraordinary achievement was the communication of tragedy and elation through forms reduced to starkest simplicityoftentimes a pair of rectangles. Born Marcus Rothkowitz in a Latvian Jewish community, the artist emigrated to the United States at the age of ten. He established himself as a leader among New York's artistic avant-garde in the late 1940s, when the devastation of a global war shunted creative impulses into radically new directions.
