Before the Color Fields: Rothko’s Forgotten Early Years

Feature image: Mark Rothko, Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, 1944 © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York via MoMA

When we think of Mark Rothko, we think of color, the immense, glowing rectangles of saturated pigment that hover and pulse across massive canvases. We think of his chapel in Houston, spiritual transcendence through abstraction, and paintings that seem to breathe with emotion. But long before Rothko became the high priest of Abstract Expressionism, he was something else entirely: a figurative painter, a myth-maker, and a quiet chronicler of the human condition.

In the decades before his breakthrough into abstraction, Rothko’s early works were filled with lonely, static figures that evoke alienation, introspection, and existential weight. These paintings, made in the 1930s and early 1940s, are rarely discussed in popular accounts of his career. And yet, they are crucial to understanding how Rothko arrived at the monumental stillness of his later work. They are, in many ways, just as haunting.

Born Marcus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Russia (now Latvia), in 1903, Rothko immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of ten. They settled in Portland, Oregon, where he quickly assimilated into American life, but the rupture of migration and his father's early death marked him deeply. These themes, displacement, mortality, and the search for identity, would haunt his entire oeuvre.

By the 1920s, Rothko had moved to New York and studied briefly at the Art Students League. He absorbed lessons from Max Weber and was introduced to modernist ideas there, though his early paintings remained tethered to representational forms. During the Great Depression, Rothko and fellow young artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning participated in the WPA Federal Art Project. Unlike them, Rothko’s early style didn’t erupt into wild expression; instead, it simmered in quiet tension.

One of the defining characteristics of Rothko’s early period is the sense of stillness and solitude in his human subjects. Works like Subway Scene (1938) depict people standing in transit hubs, not in motion, but frozen, staring, or gazing downward. They are disconnected from one another, emotionally marooned in public space. The palette is muted: ochres, muddy greens, grays. It's an urban melancholy rendered with eerie precision.

Another piece, Entrance to Subway (1938), shows figures descending into the underground. There’s no rush, no straightforward narrative, just a procession of anonymous souls, their individuality erased by the weight of modern life. These works echo the anxiety of the time: the Great Depression, looming war, and the mechanization of human existence.

Stylistically, Rothko drew inspiration from Expressionism and Surrealism, with simplified forms and psychological overtones. His figures are puppet-like, not quite naturalistic but not entirely abstract either. There’s something dreamlike and unnerving about them. You can see hints of Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical cityscapes or Edward Hopper’s lonely interiors, but Rothko’s lens is more internalized, more abstract in its emotional tone.

By the early 1940s, Rothko began turning to mythology as a symbolic language to access universal human experience, not in a classical academic sense. He and his friend Adolph Gottlieb published a manifesto in 1943, stating that "the subject matter is crucial and only that subject matter is valid, which is tragic and timeless." For Rothko, mythology provided a way to express the eternal conditions of man: birth, death, fear, and ecstasy.

Paintings like Antigone (1941) and Rites of Lilith (1945) reflect this transition. Human figures still appear, but they are flattened, stylized, and ambiguous. Symbols from myth, wings, totems, and fragmented bodies begin to populate the canvas. The narrative breaks down. What emerges is a visual language steeped in archetype and suggestion.

These works serve as a bridge between Rothko’s figurative phase and the mature abstractions that would follow. They mark his growing disinterest in the specific and the temporal, and his turn toward the universal and the eternal.

By the mid-1940s, Rothko’s experiments with myth and symbol gave way to what art historians now call the “Multiform” period. These paintings no longer depict recognizable figures or scenes, but instead present fields of color, amorphous shapes that float in space, softly bleeding into one another.

In No. 9 (Multiform) (1948), Rothko uses luminous reds, oranges, and dark patches to create an explosive and calm tension. This is the true genesis of his mature style: the color fields that, in the 1950s, would become his signature.

Crucially, Rothko never saw these works as “abstract” in the way the term is usually understood. He insisted that his paintings were about fundamental human emotions, tragedy, ecstasy, and doom. His shift away from figuration was not a rejection of humanity, but a deepening of it. He said, "I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions."

Rothko’s early work is more than just a prelude. It offers a window into his psychological and philosophical evolution. The themes he would explore abstractly, such as silence, awe, and inner turmoil, are already present in his somber subways and mythic totems. These paintings are rawer, perhaps, less refined in technique, but they are equally profound in vision.

They also speak to the social and political reality of their time. Unlike the later works, which tend to transcend historical context, Rothko’s early figures are anchored in the anxiety of the 1930s and ’40s. They reveal an artist grappling with his identity, culture, and role in a world on the brink of collapse.

Today, institutions like the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Modern Art hold some of these early pieces in their permanent collections, but they are rarely on display. Rothko’s legacy is so tightly bound to his late period that these early works remain in the shadows, awaiting their due recognition.

In revisiting Rothko’s early period, we rediscover not a different artist but a fuller one. An artist who spent years seeking a visual vocabulary for emotion, memory, and meaning, his early paintings are proof that the road to abstraction was not a leap; it was a long, slow walk through the landscape of the human soul.

Before the color fields, there was darkness. There were myths, commuters, ancient rituals, and lonely men on benches. And through them, Rothko was already building his chapel, brick by emotional brick.

All archival images in this article are used under fair use for educational and non-commercial purposes. Proper credit has been given to photographers, archives, and original sources where known.

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