Mark Rothko - Short Story

Many years ago bad days descended upon me, whatever I did, however hard I tried I could not shake off the bad times. I tried to cheer myself up by watching a movie. The movie had artistic merit but had a slow, snail-like quality to it. Nothing much happened for most of the time then suddenly at the end the primary occupant's girlfriend marries someone else, as part of a great conspiracy. In despair I watched another movie in another language. After eight catchy songs and endless fistfights and grave conspiracies by mother in laws I decided that it would be better to more or less accept my fate and not try to change it.

But one day a friend of mine said there was a public art exhibition which was held in the street near the university. I had never seen anything like it before…….oils, acrylics, water colors, pastels, drawings, and sculptures that astonished me. But what caught my eye most were colorful rectangles painted in a large canvas that everyone seemed to be interested in. It was simple but profound, I wondered who on earth would have first come up with the idea, and found that it was a painter named Mark Rothko who had lived in the United States and had moved there from Russia as a child in 1913. This method of painting is called Abstract Expressionism, though Rothko himself refused to adhere to any art movement.

In an environment where Jews were blamed for anything bad that happened in Russia, Rothko's early childhood seemed to have been plagued by fear. Soon after arriving at Ellis Island, his father passed away leaving the family without economic support. However Rothko managed to get a scholarship to Yale, but found the Yale community elitist and racist and started a magazine that lampooned the schools stuffy bourgeois tone. Being a self taught man rather than a diligent pupil he dropped out and did not return till he was awarded an honorary degree, forty six years later.

Rothko was a voracious reader and his art was brimming with ideas, and filled with mythology and philosophy. He moved through several styles until he reached signature rectangular fields of color and soon became one of the most prominent artists of the twentieth century. I was so intrigued by all this that I took up painting and soon my bad days ended