Underground Fantasy

1929–1952

Teaching children at the Brooklyn Jewish Center

From 1929 Rothko taught drawing, painting and clay sculpture part-time to schoolchildren at the Center Academy of the Brooklyn Jewish Center, where he remained until 1952.

1938

The Mercury Gallery show: a protest against the Whitney

In 1938 the group held a show at the Mercury Gallery in New York as a protest against the Whitney Museum, which it regarded as having a provincial, regionalist agenda. In these years Rothko, like Avery, Gorky, Pollock and de Kooning, found work with the Works Progress Administration.

21 February 1938

Becomes a US citizen

On 21 February 1938 Rothko received American citizenship, relieved: he had feared that the growing influence of the Nazis in Europe might lead to the sudden deportation of Jews without citizenship.

1940

Shortens his name to Mark Rothko

Concerned about rising antisemitism in Europe and America, Rothko shortened “Markus Rothkowitz” to “Mark Rothko” in 1940; “Roth” still sounded identifiably Jewish, so he settled on “Rothko”. All his works have been signed with that name since.

1940

A pause in painting for the study of myth

In 1940, it is said, Rothko stopped painting altogether to immerse himself in James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams; he later said his approach had been “reformed” by the study of the dramatic themes of myth.

1942

The Rothko–Gottlieb manifesto after the Macy’s show

New paintings were shown at a 1942 exhibition at Macy’s department store; answering a negative review in The New York Times, Rothko and Gottlieb issued a manifesto written mainly by Rothko, declaring themselves for the simple expression of the complex thought, for the large shape and for flat forms that destroy illusion and reveal truth.