Born Marcus Rothkowitz (1903-1970) in Dvinsk, Russia, the artist immigrated to the United States with his family in 1913 and settled in Portland, Oregon. After attending Yale University from 1921-23, Rothko moved to New York and intermittently attended classes at the Art Students League.

Rothko's earliest work, Expressionist landscapes and still lifes, show the influence of artist Milton Avery whom Rothko befriended shortly after arriving in New York. From 1935 to 1940 the artist was associated with The Ten, a group of American Expressionists including Adolph Gottlieb who exhibited together in New York and Paris. During the 1940s, Rothko began to experiment with new media and techniques. In 1949 he arrived at his signature style of large rectangular fields of color stacked one above another and would work within this format for the rest of his career.

Rothko largely abandoned conventional titles, sometimes resorting to numbers or colors in order to distinguish one work from another. The artist also now resisted explaining the meaning of his work. "Silence is so accurate," he said, fearing that words would only paralyze the viewer's mind and imagination.

In 1949, Rothko became fascinated by Matisse’s Red Studio, acquired by the Museum of Modern Art that year. He later credited it as a key source of inspiration for his later abstract paintings.

Soon, the "multiforms" developed into the signature style; by early 1949 Rothko exhibited these new works at the Betty Parsons Gallery. For critic Harold Rosenberg, the paintings were nothing short of a revelation. Rothko had, after painting his first "multiform," secluded himself to his home in East Hampton on Long Island. He invited only a select few, including Rosenberg, to view the new paintings.

The discovery of his definitive form came at a period of great distress to the artist; his mother Kate died in October 1948. It was at some point during that winter that Rothko happened upon the use of symmetrical rectangular blocks of two to three opposing or contrasting, yet complementary, colors, in which, for example, "the rectangles sometimes seem barely to coalesce out of the ground, concentrations of its substance. The green bar in "Magenta, Black, Green on Orange", on the other hand, appears to vibrate against the orange around it, creating an optical flicker." Additionally, for the next seven years, Rothko painted in oil only on large canvases with vertical formats.

Very large-scale designs were used in order to overwhelm the viewer, or, in Rothko’s words, to make the viewer feel "enveloped within" the painting. For some critics, the large size was an attempt to make up for a lack of substance. In retaliation, Rothko stated: "I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however . . . is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command!"