Childhood
Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Vitebsk Province, Russian Empire. His father, Jacob (Yakov) Rothkowitzwas a pharmacist and an intellectual, who provided his children with a secular and political, rather than religious, upbringing. In an environment where Jews were often blamed for many of the evils that befell Russia, Rothko's early childhood was plagued by fear.
Despite Jacob Rothkowitz's modest income, the family was highly educated, and able to speak Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew. Following Jacob's return to Orthodox Judaism, he sent Marcus, his youngest son, to the cheder at the age of five, where he studied the Talmud although his elder siblings had been educated in the public school system.
Early Career
In the autumn of 1923, Rothko found work in New York's garment district and took up residence on the Upper West Side. While visiting a friend at the Art Students League of New York, he saw students sketching a model. According to Rothko, this was the beginning of his life as an artist. Even his self-described "beginning" at the Art Students League of New York was not whole-hearted commitment; two months after he returned to Portland to visit his family, he joined a theater group run by Clark Gable's wife, Josephine Dillon. Whatever his dramatic ability may have been, he looked nothing like the successful actors of the day, and to him professional acting seemed an improbable career.
Returning to New York, Rothko briefly enrolled in the Grand Central School of Art, where one of his instructors was the artist Arshile Gorky. This was probably his first encounter with a member of the "avant-garde". That autumn, he took courses at the Art Students League of New York taught by still-life artist Max Weber, a fellow Russian Jew. It was due to Weber that Rothko began to see art as a tool of emotional and religious expression, and Rothko's paintings from this era reveal a Weberian influence.