Consuelo Kanaga · No restrictions

Rothko spent the last two decades of his career on the color field paintings — glowing, softly bordered rectangles of pure color — that made him one of the defining figures of abstract expressionism. Born to a Jewish family in Daugavpils, then part of the Russian Empire, he arrived at Ellis Island in 1913 and later settled in New York, where wartime tragedy pushed his early urban-scene painting toward myth and Surrealism before it resolved into the abstract idiom he used for the rest of his life. Commissioned to paint murals for Manhattan's Four Seasons Restaurant, he grew disgusted at the thought of his work decorating a room for wealthy diners, returned the fee, and gave the paintings to museums instead.