Prominent for his contribution to American innovations in abstract art after World War II, Mark Rothko was one of the spearheads of the group of young artists known as "the New York School." Also called "Abstract Expressionists," they included Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb, Herbert Ferber, William de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, and more than a dozen others who met regularly to exchange new ideas toward the development of abstract art. Theirs was more a movement than a style of painting and sculpture, focusing on ideas surrounding a new way of defining art. Motivated by the European surrealists who had emigrated to New York in the wake of political oppression in Nazi Germany in the late 1930's, the younger artists established a powerful wave of influence that literally "captured" the artworld away from its former center in Paris. As a result, America had established international importance in avante-garde art. Rothko's role in the sweeping changes that followed is earmarked by his mature works, large paintings of soft-focus hovering rectangles, beginning with acid colors in the early 1950's and developing into somber maroons and blacks just before his self-inflicted death in 1970. Less familiar are his prior to this period as he was experiencing Surrealism on his own terms, experimenting with "automatism" and dream-like "biomorphic" imagery that was the crux of that movement. The notion of tapping into the subconscious for forms and modes of expression was in the air for him and his contemporaries and informs his paintings of the 1940's. Earlier still are his works from the 1930's, figurative investigations of forms generated by Cubism and Expressionism of the post-World War I era. Assimilating the idea that all art of importance must be "tragic and timeless," Rothko, Newman, and Gottlieb, sent a declaration of this intent to the New York Times in 1943 - language which established the importance of myth as well as the essential fabric from which the new art world would be woven. Inspired also by Friedrich Nietzche's Birth of Tragedy, Rothko stated that mythology was meaningful to him, not for "the particular anecdote, but rather [for]...the Spirit of the Myth." This spirit was to become the hallmark of the artist's quest in the years to follow. Rothko's family tradition originated in Dvinsk, Russia, where he was born in 1903. Emigrating to the United States in 1913, he spent his youth in Portland, Oregon, and later he studied at Yale University. He moved to New York in 1923 and began to study art at the Art Students League. His relationship with the young American avante-garde began in the early 1930's through opportunities to exhibit at the little galleries in New York willing to take a chance on emerging artists. His first New York exhibition was held in 1933 at the Contemporary Arts Gallery. Exhibiting at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery in the mid 1940's placed him in the milieu of the Surrealists and the burgeoning New York School. Subsequent galleries, Betty Parsons, Sidney Janis, and Marlboro, handled his work in New York and provided him with annual solo exhibitions throughout his career. The exhibition at the Lore Degenstein Gallery celebrates the early works of Mark Rothko with twenty-six paintings, a selection from 195 paintings and over 770 drawings donated to the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., in 1986 by The Mark Rothko Foundation. Organized by the National Lending Service, the loan is part of a program designed to make the National Gallery's collection more accesible to museums nationwide. It is our privilege to hold this special exhibition, the second such opportunity at Susquehanna University following the distinctive collection of North American Indian paintings by George Catlin held in 1995.   Untitled. Mark Rothko. Oil on canvas. 44.31 x 37.44" National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation