First living member of his generation to have a one man show at MOMA.

Friends with (then not) with Clyfford Still and Barnett Newmann.

"There's no one to hang out with anymore...they're too busy achieving things."

"I'm in despair... it's because everyone can see what a fraud I am."

Daugavpils - means "Castle by the Dauga."

As one of the town's historians told me, "the railroad brought people here, and it took those who wanted to achieve anything away."

January 9, 1905 - Bloody Sunday in Russian History. The Czar's soliders killed over two hundred of the peasants, workers, students, liberals in a peacful St. Petersburg political march.

"Destroy the Jews and save Russia," became the Russian nationalists' slogan...

Rothko lived at 17 Shosseynaya (or "highway-like road"), one long block from the Dvina...

Dore Ashton noticed Rothko's fondness for words that have the prefix "trans," words like "transcend," or "translate," or "transplant."

A self can emerge only from within a context - a family, a society, a culture.

"the only serious thing is death; nothing else is to be taken seriously."

Took a class from Arshile Gorky.

Painting also defied the traditional Jewish taboo against iconic images..

When the young Soutine, for example, had asked a rabbi to sit for a portrait, the rabbi's son had beaten him.

Weber emphasized the divine indwelling spirit of the creator and the emotional force of the work. "Always it is expression before means," he stressed. "Art is not mere representation," it is "releveation," "prophecy," making "of dead or indifferent matter the very abode for the spirit."

Alfred Jensen - "Avery brought color to America."

The Ten - Ben-Zion, Ilya Bolotowsky, Adolph Gottileb, Louis Harris, Yankel Kufeld, Louis Schanker, Nahum Tschacbasov, Marcus Rothkowitz, Joseph Solman

Attacking the Whitney was a way to grab some of what little public attention was then paid to art, and it worked; the "Whitney Dissenters" show attracted a WPA adult art-tour and several reviews.

Read two books titled "Expressionism in Art" - one by Oskar Pfister and the other by Sheldon Cheney.

Rothkie

Among the painters and sculptors taken on by the WPA were Milton Avery, William Baziotes, James Brooks, William deKooning, Arshille Gorky, Philip Guston, Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, David Smith - plus eight of the nine core members of the Ten.

Read Nietzche's The Birth of Tragedy and Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling Kafka's - The Trial

"Zero Hour" had been 3:00 a.m., Sunday, June 22, 1940 - when a German invasion force of 3 million soldiers began moving across the thousand-mile western border of the Soviet Union.

No hero himself, Mark Rothko was declared 4F, a painter probably saved from the draft by his bad eyesight...

He once claimed that in 1940 he had stopped painting for a year to study myth, a characteristically hyperbolic statement that may even be true.

Gottileb - "The only good art school is a museum."

Herbert Ferber remembered Rothko "lying on the grass in Vienna listening with total attention to the whole of Don Giovanni." "I became a painter because I wanted to raise painting to the level of poignancy of music and poetry."

Nietzche - "Man today stripped of myth, stands famished among all his pasts and must dig frantically for roots, be it among the most remote antiquities."

In Nietzche's text, Dionysus is the god of intoxication, transport and fusion, Apollo the god of dream, illusion and individuation.

The war, which also brought Marc Chagall, Fernand Leger, Jaques Lipchitz, and Piet Mondrian to this country, had forced the provincial New York art scene towar internationalism.

Miro - "Rather than setting out to paint something, I begin painting and as I paint the picture begins to assert itself, or suggest itself under my brush."

"I was a foreigner and she made an American out of me." - to Mell

multiforms

"There you are caught up in a frenzy that brings you to the edge of madness, as far as you can go without coming back. The return is a series of dazedweeks during which you are only half alive."

..."The Romantics Were Prompted" constitutes the first, and only, extended published statement about his work that Rothko ever made on his own.

To "pulverize" is to "crush, grind, into a powder or dust," an activity familiar to Rothko, who in the late forties was grinding his own pigments with a mortar and pestle.

The downtown artists - deKooning, Kline, Pollack - met in studios and bars, most often the Cedar Bar in Greenwich Village. The uptown artists - Ferber, Gottileb, Motherwell, Newman, Rothko - met in studios and each other's homes, most often that of Ferber, who earned enough money from his dental practice to be able to afford good food, drink, and a penthouse apartment along Riverside Drive.