Artist. Born Marcus Rothkovitch in Dvinsk, Russia (present day Daugavpils, Latvia), the son of Katherine Anna Goldin and Yakov Rothkovitch, a pharmacist. His family emigrated to the United States in 1913. A good student, he attended Yale University on scholarship for two years, dropping out after losing funding before earning a degree. He then settled in New York City and studied briefly at the Art Students League under Max Weber. For funds, in 1929, he began teaching drawing, painting, and clay sculpture at the Center Academy of the Brooklyn Jewish Center. He produced canvasses influenced by Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1939, he ceased to be interested in representational art, settling into a modernist abstract style. He claimed to have worked toward continuous simplification, and most of his work featured large rectangular expanses of color melting into the next. He held a one man show at the Betty Parson Gallery between 1950 and 1951, and at The Art Institute of Chicago in 1954. He provided paintings for The Four Seasons restaurant in 1958, a retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961, and in 1964 he received a commission to create large wall murals for a chapel on the campus of St. Thomas Catholic University for which he generated fourteen paintings; the Rothko Chapel has since gained international notice. In 1968, he suffered an aortal aneurysm, and was told to stop working large canvasses, his poor physical health then led to depression. His declining health contributed to the estrangement from his wife, from whom he then separated. He moved into his studio, where in February 1970, his assistant found him dead of an apparent suicide. A book, 'Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas: Catalogue Raisonné' edited by David Anfam was published in 1998. 'The Artist's Reality,' edited by Christopher Rothko from a manuscript by Mark Rothko was published in 2006.