If you really want to know Rothko, read Dore Ashton. Breslin tends to simplify things and I don't think that he really loves Rothko or has communicated with the paintings. Only for die-hard Rothkoites like me.

No book can do Mark Rothko justice. He painted on large
canvases. To know him is to confront his original work
on the wall before you. Find your distance, 10, 15,
maybe 30 feet back. Yet to make sense of his
colored rectangles tearing themselves apart in fission,
as well as his earlier, quite different work, some
background helps.

Breslin's book will become the standard reference, but
not perhaps the starting point. He writes engrossingly,
but the 558 pages of text, I fear, will discourage the
casual reader (who might do well to read Robert
Hughes's paragraphs in American Visions).

Still, for the motivated reader, James Breslin's bio is
awesome. The Latvian Jew, charity student at
antisemitic Yale in the early 20s, uncomfortable and
smarter than most there, comes alive, as does his love
for children and their art, as well as his tormented
first marriage to a wife commercially successful during
the Great Depression making jewelry that sold. Rothko
had higher ambitions: fine art spelled with a capital
"A". As Breslin relates, discomfort never disappeared.
Success and recognition did not go over well with
this self-described anarchist who, as a Portland
teenager, enthusiastically took in lectures by Emma
Goldman. Overall, Breslin provides a biographical and
historical foundation with which to understand Mark
Rothko's painting. I am grateful for that.

Finally, of the many biographies I've read, James EB
Breslin's stands out for another reason: in his
Afterword, he turns from Rothko to himself and
addresses his own motivations and challenges in writing
the biography. Biographies are never "objective", so it
makes sense that a biographer might address his own
motivations. In the descriptions of the dangers of
doing research in Rothko's birthplace of Dvinsk, in
interviewing art historian Clement Greenberg, Rothko
reappears again, this time indirectly, one step
removed. That Breslin can bring Rothko alive in these

different contexts is testament to the enduring value
of this long, challenging biography.

Within the power of a single Rothko painting is the power to inspire a deeply rich volume of subtle and large meanings. Breslin offers a non-stop flight through the creative intelligence and expressed worlds of Rothko. The reader is met with a gorgeous poetic escape from the mundane reality of worldly distress. Breslin could not have had more success. To read this book is to enter a cathedral: one finds reverence in the read and in the self. Rothko's suicide seems like a scribble on the wall. The wall may remain forever marred. The bitter marks, and this book, evoke so many lost possibilities for the artist and his audience.