Untitled

The influx of European artists into the United States in the wake of the Spanish Civil War and World War II changed the trajectory of American abstraction. In particular, the arrival of several prominent Surrealists in New York was instrumental in shifting the focus of many American artists from a rigid attention to structure to the creation of more organic and spontaneous compositions using Surrealist “automatic” painting techniques. The biomorphic imagery in Mark Rothko’s early paintings manifests universal and timeless themes, with organic forms that suggest a primal world in the process of metamorphosis. The artist’s use of the unconscious as a source for art and his determination to evoke what he called “the Spirit of Myth” in his early work foreshadows his better-known Abstract Expressionist paintings of the postwar period.