Mark Rothko : a biography /

Artists, unlike writers, have long suffered from a want of good biographers. From Giorgio Vasari to Irving Stone the lives of artists are generally scripted as a form of metafiction. Breslin's account of the career of Mark Rothko establishes a major exception to this practice as well as a new paradigm for scholarly biography. Densely researched, thoughtfully written, and epically scaled, the book affords a compelling and often distressing record of the painter's life and art. Drawing upon numerous personal interviews with critics, curators, and clients, the author assembles a composite image of Rothko that reaffirms the adage that one should never get to know one's favorite artist. The pictorial whole is greater than the sum of the lived parts. Paranoid, hypocritical, and alcoholic, the persona of the artist does not easily cohere with the painter of the magisterial and luminous body of work. Breslin's descriptions and interpretations of individual works and projects are especially thorough and sensitive. Both the agony and the ecstasy are chronicled in lugubrious detail. An excellent "Afterword" addresses the possibilities of biography in the postmodern world of critical theory as well as the problematic of the self in relation to the expressive art work and its acessibility to the critic and the public. Not exactly a "fun read," this publication is recommended for all art history libraries. General; undergraduate through professional. R. L. McGrath; Dartmouth College

A hefty, bear-like man with voracious appetites, an alcoholic who withdrew into isolation and took his own life, Mark Rothko (1903-1970) made paintings that transformed despair into transcendent beauty. Breslin's biography, a splendid achievement, exorcises Rothko's private demons and explores how he invented a modern art which enacted his inner drama. Born Marcus Rothkowitz in Russia, raised in Portland, Oregon, from age 10, the painter launched an iconoclastic underground newspaper at Yale, became a ``self-made proletarian'' in the Depression, and progressed from expressionist urban moodscapes to surreal mythic pictures to the free-floating stacked rectangles that are his trademark. A melancholy man who never felt fully at home in his adopted country, Rothko festered with indignation as an outsider, but once he achieved fame and insider status, he felt corrupted and doomed by it, according to Breslin, a UC-Berkeley Enlgish professor and biographer of William Carlos Williams. Illustrated. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The full-bodied fruit of seven years' labor--a zealous, uncommonly kind portrait of one of Abstract Expressionism's irascible masters--from Breslin (William Carlos Williams, 1970). Marcus Rothkowitz, born in 1903 in the Russian city of Dvinsk, emigrated with his family in 1913 to Portland, Oregon. Rebellious as a youth, he dropped out of Yale after a taste of refined Eastern anti-Semitism, turning instead to Manhattan and the painter's life. Impoverished, Rothko lived in a series of cold-water flats and run- down neighborhoods during the Depression and WW II, often confronting the city's museum establishment, which then had eyes only for European art. The painter's first wife's money demands--as well as the success of her jewelry business, which turned him at times into her salesman--resulted in divorce; but with remarriage in 1945 to the young, adoring Mell, Rothko came to be seen as one of a distinctly American group of artists. In the late 1940's, he embraced the abstract luminous colors and rectangular forms that became his trademark, and, in the hands of aggressive dealers, he went rapidly from rags to riches. Still defiant, he returned, after two years' work, a commission to paint panels for the celebrated Four Seasons restaurant when he realized that his efforts could be only decorative. Other commissions followed, but Rothko's colors darkened as his health and marriage deteriorated. In 1970, in despair and pressured by his dealer to sell more paintings, he committed suicide. Providing an expansive view of Rothko and his milieu, and rich in information about the New York art scene--but a breathless enthusiasm for his subject leads Breslin to descriptive excess, especially with regard to individual paintings. (Color & b&w illustrations)