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"I became a painter because I wanted to raise painting to the level of poignancy of music and poetry." Born Marcus Rothkowitz in a small Russian town, Mark Rothko immigrated to Portland, Oregon, in 1913, when he was 10 years old. "You don't know what it is to be a Jewish kid dressed in a suit that is a Dvinsk, not an American, idea of a suit traveling across America and not able to speak English," he later told fellow abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell. Rothko was a weak child, an abandoned son (his father had gone to America in 1910 and died of cancer just seven months after the family was reunited), a Jew excluded from high school clubs, a Yale freshman on scholarship, and a college dropout determined to become an Artist with a capital A. James Breslin has written an exhaustive biography of the painter. He pulled together all the facts of Rothko's life and carefully examined all the strata of the artist's personality--Rothko's sensitivity, his sense of displacement, his pride and his diffidence, his combativeness, his love for his children, his hatred for Marlborough Gallery director Frank Lloyd, and his difficulties with money. The book is flawed only by Breslin's ticlike use of italics, which give the sense of the author tugging at our sleeve in an unnecessary effort to persuade: "Rothko's last and most severe renunciations were made not to remove obstacles between the observer and the idea but in a gesture of personal withdrawal." But this is a relatively minor trifle that does not unduly detract from this large--and large-spirited--book about a tormented, brilliant Artist. --Peggy Moorman
From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
