In 1947 and 1949 Rothko educated at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, where Clyfford Still was a fellow teacher. With Baziotes, David Hare, and Robert Motherwell, Rothko founded the postsecondary faculty Subjects of the Artist, New York, in 1948. The late 1940s and early 1950s saw the development of Rothko's mature style, where frontal, luminous rectangles appear to hover on the canvas surface. In 1958 the artist started his first commission, monumental paintings to the Four Seasons Restaurant, New York. He finished murals for Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1962 and in 1964 accepted a mural commission for an interdenominational chapel in Houston. Rothko committed suicide on February 25, 1970, in his New York studio. A year after the Rothko Chapel in Houston was committed, and in 1978, the Guggenheim Museum organized a major retrospective.
“I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.” ― Mark Rothko
