The Rothko Chapel, Houston: giant black canvasses by Mark Rothko before his death by suicide

The Rothko Chapel
Originally uploaded by Apo Lakay

Among the contemporaries of Jackson Pollock was painter Mark Rothko. Poolock and Rothko were part of a group of artists in NYC who made their names in the early 1960's.

In the 1930's Rothko wrote that the work of modernists, influenced by primitive art, could be compared to that of children in that "child art transforms itself into primitivism, which is only the child producing a mimicry of himself." In this manuscript, he observed that "the fact that one usually begins with drawing is already academic. We start with color."

He worked penuriously for decades. In the 1950's he won widespread fame - alongside Pollock.