Mark Rothko (1903-1970). American artist of Latvian origin (birth name Marcus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz). Born into a Jewish family, his childhood was marked by the horrors of pogroms and he emigrated to the United States in 1913. He belongs to the Abstract Expressionists (although he refused this label refused and considered himself an abstract painter). In 1936 in New York, he participated in several Cubist and Surrealist exhibitions and his fame began to slowly rise. At the end of the 50s, he developed a specific style of multiform painting - abstract blocks of blurred and intermingled colours. He worked with untreated canvas, upon which he applied think layers of colour on top of each and thus created intertwined coloured structures. He marked his works often only by numbers and sometimes placed them in opposition. For Rothko, colour was merely a means and his multiforms were an expression of basic human emotions (as for surrealists) in a pure and abstract form.