- Paperback: 700 pages
- Publisher: University of Chicago Press; New edition edition (15 May 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0226074064
- ISBN-13: 978-0226074061
- Product Dimensions: 23.8 x 16.6 x 4.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,222,811 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Description
Product Description
This is a full-length biography of Mark Rothko, arguably one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Drawing on exclusive access to his personal papers and over 100 interviews with artists, patrons and dealers, the author tells the story of a life in art: the personal costs and professional triumphs, the convergence of genius and ego, culture and commerce, that defined the New York art scene of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s - the world of Abstract Expressionism, of Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning and Kline.
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First Sentence
For eight months during the winter of 1958 and the spring of 1959, Mark Rothko worked, eight hours daily, on a set of murals he had been commissioned to produce for the Four Seasons restaurant in the new Seagram Building being constructed on Park Avenue, between 52nd and 53rd Streets, in New York City. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
For eight months during the winter of 1958 and the spring of 1959, Mark Rothko worked, eight hours daily, on a set of murals he had been commissioned to produce for the Four Seasons restaurant in the new Seagram Building being constructed on Park Avenue, between 52nd and 53rd Streets, in New York City. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
If you really want to know Rothko, read Dore Ashton. Breslin tends to simplify things and I don't think that he really loves Rothko or has communicated with the paintings. Only for die-hard Rothkoites like me.
3 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Within the power of a single Rothko painting is the power to inspire a deeply rich volume of subtle and large meanings. Breslin offers a non-stop flight through the creative intelligence and expressed worlds of Rothko. The reader is met with a gorgeous poetic escape from the mundane reality of worldly distress. Breslin could not have had more success. To read this book is to enter a cathedral: one finds reverence in the read and in the self. Rothko's suicide seems like a scribble on the wall. The wall may remain forever marred. The bitter marks, and this book, evoke so many lost possibilities for the artist and his audience.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
10 reviews
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful
For Rothko, the best a book can do
7 July 2002
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
No book can do Mark Rothko justice. He painted on large
canvases. To know him is to confront his original work
on the wall before you. Find your distance, 10, 15,
maybe 30 feet back. Yet to make sense of his
colored rectangles tearing themselves apart in fission,
as well as his earlier, quite different work, some
background helps.
canvases. To know him is to confront his original work
on the wall before you. Find your distance, 10, 15,
maybe 30 feet back. Yet to make sense of his
colored rectangles tearing themselves apart in fission,
as well as his earlier, quite different work, some
background helps.
Breslin's book will become the standard reference, but
not perhaps the starting point. He writes engrossingly,
but the 558 pages of text, I fear, will discourage the
casual reader (who might do well to read Robert
Hughes's paragraphs in American Visions).
Still, for the motivated reader, James Breslin's bio is
awesome. The Latvian Jew, charity student at
antisemitic Yale in the early 20s, uncomfortable and
smarter than most there, comes alive, as does his love
for children and their art, as well as his tormented
first marriage to a wife commercially successful during
the Great Depression making jewelry that sold. Rothko
had higher ambitions: fine art spelled with a capital
"A". As Breslin relates, discomfort never disappeared.
Success and recognition did not go over well with
this self-described anarchist who, as a Portland
teenager, enthusiastically took in lectures by Emma
Goldman. Overall, Breslin provides a biographical and
historical foundation with which to understand Mark
Rothko's painting. I am grateful for that.
Finally, of the many biographies I've read, James EB
Breslin's stands out for another reason: in his
Afterword, he turns from Rothko to himself and
addresses his own motivations and challenges in writing
the biography. Biographies are never "objective", so it
makes sense that a biographer might address his own
motivations. In the descriptions of the dangers of
doing research in Rothko's birthplace of Dvinsk, in
interviewing art historian Clement Greenberg, Rothko
reappears again, this time indirectly, one step
removed. That Breslin can bring Rothko alive in these
different contexts is testament to the enduring value
of this long, challenging biography.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Read This Book
2 Aug 2007
Format:Paperback
I am a painter, an art professor, and a reader of biographies. I couldnt put this book down. Breslin did a magnificent job of getting inside the psyche of Rothko as a man, and as an artist. The paragraphs that describe the way in which Rothko created one of his paintings is absolutely inspired....I had goose-bumps reading it, because it seemed as if Breslin,unlike many writers who say they have observed artists, actually understood the process of creation and the passion behind it. I have never written a fan letter to a writer, but I began one to Mr.Breslin. Imagine my distress and sorrow when I read the next day in the paper that he had passed away! But this book lives as a testament to his thorough research and love of the subject. Get this book and read it....if you love art, artists, or scholarship,you will not be disappointed.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
One of the best books on art let alone Rothko
23 Jun 2009
Format:Paperback
Only a few biographies of artists are any good. A Giacometti Portrait by James Lord and Picasso by John Richardson and Jackson Pollock by Steven Naifeh come to mind. After reading this excellent biography I must place it with these great books. I am tired of reading art critics who obscure great art rather than illuminate it. This work opens up to the layman in simple and clear writing the beauty and complexity of this modern artist in his struggle to create meaningful and profound art. In this post modernist world such ambitions are scoffed at. Irony is easy but to be profound is the most dangerous thing an artist can attempt. He risks being pompous and bombastic. But Rothko avoids these pitfalls and in the process has become one of our greatest artists. I hope you have as much fun reading this as I did. Books like this are rare. Get it.
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