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
Mark Rothko wrote several philosophical statements that would continue to guide his art for years to come. "I favor in my work the simple expression of the complex thought. I am for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal and the wish to reassert the picture plane. I am an adept of flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal the truth."
The scale and surface of several paintings reflect these ideas. Mark Rothko abandoned the traditional Renaissance three-point perspective, which conceives of the canvas as a window onto another world. Dark varying opacity pigments make the picture's surface feel flat, yet it quivers and vibrates, offering a feel of atmospheric depth. Mark intended these compositional strategies to invite the viewer emotional and visual contemplation, creating the state for reflection and silence.
Rothko once said, "Often, towards late evening, there's a feel of mistery in the air, frustration, threat - sort of all of these at once. I want my paintings to have the quality of such moments."
