Guest Author - Sandy Hemphill


The Wall Street Journal has just reported the $310 million dollar sale of a collection of paintings by Mark Rothko to an undisclosed buyer. J. Ezra Merkin is selling the paintings plus two sculptures by surrealist Alberto Giacometti. Merkin is under investigation as an operative in a feeder hedge fund that helped disgraced financier Bernie Madoff pull off the largest Ponzi scheme in history. As Madoff serves 150 years in prison, Merkin has been sued by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo; the terms of the lawsuit against him include a freeze on all Merkin’s assets. The art collection sale comes with NY court sanction, with the expectation proceeds will contribute to a fund created to recoup investor losses realized in the Madoff Ponzi scheme.

That Mark Rothko’s paintings are making headlines almost 40 years after his death should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the painter’s life. His personal history is deeply interwoven with some of the biggest news stories of the 20th century.

Born Marcus Rothkowitz in Latvia in 1903, Rothko’s early years were overshadowed by the constant fear Latvian Jews faced from anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia. In spite of the political turmoil and modest financial means, Rothko’s father, Jacob, emphasized the value of a good education over religious dogma but violence remained enough of a threat that Jacob began moving his family to the United States. Marcus, his sister, and their mother were the last family members to emigrate to the US, doing so in 1913, in time to avoid the Russian Revolution of 1917.

During the Great Depression, Rothko’s fledgling career as a painter perplexed his hard-working family but the avant-garde art movements underway influenced his artistic vision, confirmed his talent, and his colorful, distinctive personal style emerged.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP) put Rothko to work earning $32.28 a week. He and other artists, including Diego Rivera, Jackson Pollock, David Smith, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning, painted murals in post offices and other public buildings across the nation.

Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung made dream interpretation and mythology hot topics in the 1940s and their impact on Rothko was profound.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings on Greek tragedy led Rothko to describe the tragic experience as the only source of art. His work drifted further away from the figurative and deeper into the enormous, multiform expressionistic paintings for which he is best known today.

In the 1950s, Baron John de Menil and his wife, Dominique Schlumberger de Menil, commissioned Rothko to create all the paintings in a chapel that would expand their world-renowned art collection. The Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, opened in 1971.

In 1958, the Joseph Seagram and Sons beverage company contracted Rothko to create wall-sized paintings for their new Seagram Building on Park Avenue in New York City, designed by Mies Van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. The paintings, destined for the famed Four Seasons Restaurant, were never completed. The artist claimed the restaurant was too pretentious for his work.

At John F. Kennedy’s inauguration ball in 1961, Rothko was seated next to the new president’s father, Joseph Kennedy.

Mark Rothko had been struggling with depression as far back as the 1940s, when he divorced his first wife and his beloved mother died. Historians claim his use of darker and darker colors over the years was a reflection of his own inner turmoil. Poor lifestyle choices and an aneurysm in 1968 took their toll on the artist’s unstable mood. He committed suicide on February 25, 1970.

The following year, the Rothko Chapel opened. Dignitaries who have visited it include the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Jonas Salk, and Jimmy Carter. The Whirling Dervishes of Konya, Turkey, have performed there and Peter Gabriel was inspired to write his song, Fourteen Black Paintings, after a visit to the chapel. The chapel is now listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

There is speculation Mark Rothko’s children are the mystery buyers of the Merkin collection but that possibility remains unconfirmed at this time.