TEL AVIV, ISRAEL.-The American Friends of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art is pleased to announce that the first retrospective exhibition in Israel of works by Mark Rothko (1903 - 1970) will be on view from March 29 through June 30, 2007 at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s Sam and Ayala Zacks Pavilion.

One of the preeminent artists of his generation, Mark Rothko was a pillar of the New York School and instrumental in developing a new and profound collective voice in American art. Largely acclaimed for his rigorous attention to formal elements such as color, shape, balance, depth, composition, and scale; Rothko refused to consider his paintings solely in these terms. “The people who weep before my paintings,” said Rothko in 1965, “are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.”

Curated by Dr. Christopher Rothko, an author and the son of the artist, and Prof. Mordechai Omer, Director and Chief Curator of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the 38 paintings and works on paper on view will present a coherent historical view of the evolution of Rothko’s oeuvre from 1936 to 1969. The exhibition was made possible largely through the close involvement of Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko. “As a dynamic international cultural center, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art is pleased to have the distinction of organizing this first Rothko retrospective in Israel,” said Mordechai Omer. “We are grateful to the artist's daughter and son, Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko, who have been instrumental in both organizing and in lending numerous works for this important exhibition and to The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Detroit Institute of Arts, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, and other public and private collections in the United States, Europe, and Israel for their generous loans," he added.

Arranged chronologically, the exhibition follows the development of Rothko’s work from his early, socially conscious paintings completed during the Depression years; Surrealist, biomorphic-abstract works of the early to middle 1940s, which were influenced largely by Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy”; paintings of deconstructed forms from his completely abstract “multiforms” of the late 1940s; classic paintings of the 1950s, which are distinguished by an emphasis on pure pictorial elements such as color, surface, and structure; and the dark paintings of his late years.

Although Rothko never traveled to Israel, he was a strong supporter of the Jewish state and expressed a desire to have an exhibition there. In 1986, The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc., New York, donated two major paintings by Rothko to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. These works, along with another significant early gouache from the Museum's collection sewed the seeds for a future Rothko exhibition at the Museum, a proposition which crystallized during a 2005 visit to the Museum by Christopher Rothko, and through subsequent meetings and discussions with Director Mordechai Omer.

Nearly twenty years as a figurative painter honed Rothko’s awareness of the role of space and form and set the stage for the close study of proportion in his late work. In the 1930s Rothko painted interiors, cityscapes with a specific time and place orientation, and the enclosed spaces of the New York subway. His depictions of interior scenes in which formal considerations already dominate are represented in works on view such as Untitled (Seated Man), 1938/1939. Rothko's New York scene paintings have long been credited with motifs and compositional devices that seem to anticipate the artist's later pictorial concerns as evidenced by Entrance to Subway (Subway Station/Subway Scene), 1938.

Around 1940, Rothko evolved from figurative painting into a Surrealist biomorphic-abstract style. He turned to the distant domains of the imagination, deriving the themes for his paintings from ancient myths, archaic landscapes and mythological stories, as exemplified by Rites of Lilith, 1945.

In the mid-1940s, the biomorphic forms that characterized the Surrealist phase in Rothko’s work gave way to abstract color patches that gradually merged into a weave of rectangular forms spread on the painting’s surface, known as his “multiform” works. Selections on view from this series signal the artist’s discovery of color as a primary expressive medium. Representing the brink of Rothko’s arrival at his classic style, in Untitled, 1948, and No. 20, 1949, color is clearly dominant and given free rein and constitutes, according to Christopher Rothko, an experience that had not been realized before nor will be again in Rothko’s paintings.

In 1949 and 1950 the artist’s tendency toward reduction took shape in terms of form and color as well as significant enlargement of format. This pivotal transitional period between Rothko’s “multiforms” series and his classic sectionals is represented in the exhibition by works such as Untitled, 1950, and No. 24 (Untitled), 1951, which chronicle the first stages of Rothko edging towards the rectangular form.

The years from 1957 to 1962 were absolutely critical to Rothko’s development. In 1957 Rothko began working on the first series of works exploring the effects of a darker palette that would lend a new dramatic force to his paintings. Works such as Black over Reds (Black on Red), 1957, and No. 30 (Brown, Wine and Black), 1962, on view would serve as a point of departure for his later works, and would eventually lead to the “black-form paintings” of 1964. Beginning around 1957, Rothko also began to shift the orientation of many of his paintings by increasingly enlarging their formats. Rothko's reworking and near obsession with form and proportion would influence the very essence of his mural commissions to come.

This exhibition culminates in a grouping of paintings from Rothko’s renowned classic period, and the dark paintings of his late years. While the, large scale of the monumental proportions of Rothko’s classic paintings were conceived by the artist as a means to allow the viewer to connect to the canvas as if it were a living entity. Rothko also believed that his paintings could express emotions associated with major themes such as tragedy, ecstasy, and the sublime without symbolic imagery. Reflecting a condensed palette of black, gray, brown, muted ochres and blues, examples from the artist’s last years are represented in the exhibition by Untitled, 1969, among others.

The accompanying bi-lingual (English/Hebrew) 244-page catalogue published by the Tel Aviv Museum of Art includes 38 full-page color reproductions; essays by Christopher Rothko and Mordechai Omer, Esther Dotan, and John Gage (reprinted from the National Gallery of Art’s Rothko Retrospective 1988 exhibition catalogue, and Natalie Kosoi, with biographical notes by Ahuva Israel. The Rothko exhibition and catalogue have been sponsored by Ambassador Ronald S. Lauder; Lauren and Steven P. Schwartz; Lauren and J. Ezra Merkin; Sheldon Bergh Award for Curatorial Research Abroad; Bank Hapoalim, Platinum Banking; El Al Cargo; and the American Friends of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.