Mark Rothko
(1903 - 1970)

Mark Rothko (1903 -1970)

By 1945 Rothko had painted himself away and out of surrealism. One of the last exhibitions of his surrealist works was at SFMOMA in 1946. His close association with Clyfford Still led him into a transitional period of multiform paintings. They contained “a breath of life” he found lacking in his earlier work. This new direction was imminent in his work when he taught summer school at the California School of Fine Arts in 1947, as he referred to this summer at CSFA as “magical.”