On Mark Rothko

A journey to Daugavpils, Latvia, to learn about the birthplace of the Abstract Expressionist artist Mark Rothko and to find out whether the city and his childhood in its then bustling but fearful Jewish streets influenced his art. Join me as we visit the Rothko Museum and explore Daugavpils.

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On Mark Rothko

On a grey Latgale morning at the end of November, with snow on the streets, it is easy to understand why some people say Daugavpils looks more like a Russian garrison town than Latvia’s second‑largest city.

After stepping off the train from Rīga, and a 30-minute walk through the city, a star-shaped fortress rises from the river plain – ramparts, brick barracks, and an old artillery arsenal that once supplied the Tsar’s army. Somewhere within that red‑brick maze is a room containing vast fields of colour – orange and chocolate, brown and black floating on dark wine – paintings that changed the course of 20th‑century art. That is what I came to find after the three-hour journey. And the man behind them, one of the great names of American Abstract Expressionism, began his life not in New York or Paris, but right here, in what was then the Russian Empire town of Dvinsk, now Daugavpils, in the Republic of Latvia.

In this episode, we will walk through Mark Rothko’s birthplace: from the crowded Jewish streets of early‑1900s Dvinsk, through his journey to America and the colour‑saturated canvases he created there, and back again – to the Mark Rothko Museum in Daugavpils Fortress, and to the city that still carries the ghosts of his childhood.

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A Jewish childhood in Dvinsk

Imagine Daugavpils not as the slightly sleepy post‑Soviet city of today, but as Dvinsk around 1903 – a bustling railway junction in the Vitebsk Governorate of the Russian Empire, on the borderlands between Russia, Poland, and the Baltic provinces.

The city is a fortress, both literally and metaphorically. The river Daugava curves beneath high banks. Trains rattle through, transporting troops and goods. Inside the walls, a busy, thriving Jewish quarter buzzes with trade: tailors, shoemakers, match factories, tanneries, and workshops owned mainly by Jews. Around the turn of that century, about half the town’s population was Jewish: tens of thousands of people making a life here.

This is where Marcus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz was born on 25 September 1903 - the future Mark Rothko. His father, Jacob, was a pharmacist: educated, politically engaged, part of a middle-class Jewish family that valued books and ideas. Accounts of Jacob differ. Some remember him as a Marxist and “violently anti‑religious”, while others emphasise his late-in‑life turn to piety, which led him to send his youngest son to heder, a religious school. Both perspectives can be true in a place like Dvinsk: a city where Zionists, socialists, merchants and rabbis debate in the same smoke-filled rooms. For young Marcus, childhood is shaped by contradictions. On one side, there is learning: Hebrew texts, the Talmud, Russian and Yiddish newspapers, and political pamphlets. Dvinsk is known as a centre of Jewish thought; the community runs aid societies, schools, soup kitchens, and hospitals. On the other side, there is fear: the awareness that beyond the relative safety of the city walls, anti-Semitic violence is never far away. The early 1900s are often described as “the worst in the history of Russian Jewry”. Pogroms sweep across the empire; even if Dvinsk itself is spared major attacks, stories of violence travel down the railway lines and into synagogue courtyards. Growing up Jewish here means living with a constant hum of anxiety.

Decades later, Rothko’s art is often described as “tragic and timeless”, immersed in fundamental human emotions: “tragedy, ecstasy, doom”. When you stand before a Rothko canvas, colour appears to hover and tremble at the verge of darkness, as if something dreadful and beautiful is about to unfold.

It is tempting – perhaps irresistible – to see the origins of that sensibility in childhood: a boy in a fortress town, on the edge of empires, learning that life for Jews is unstable; that safety can be taken away; that one may need to leave everything behind.

And that is precisely what the Rothkowitz family chooses to do.

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Leaving Dvinsk

When Marcus is about ten, the family decides to follow a path already taken by many neighbours: one of emigration. There are push factors such as anti-Semitic restrictions, the threat of conscription, economic hardship, and rumours of upcoming pogroms. Meanwhile, there is a pull from distant relatives in America, in Portland, Oregon, who send back letters and, importantly, money.

The story goes that Rothko’s father travels first with his older sons. Marcus and his mother follow later. In late 1913 the young boy stands on the deck of a ship approaching Ellis Island, trading the flat fields and birch woods of Latgale for the Statue of Liberty and New York Harbour. However, within a year, Jacob died of colon cancer. The eleven‑year‑old Marcus recites Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, and then, as one biographer notes, abandons organised religion altogether.

The feeling of disconnection is deep. Later in life, Rothko describes what it was like to be “a Jewish kid dressed in a suit that is a Dvinsk, not an American, idea of a suit, travelling across America and not able to speak English”. An outsider in every sense: foreign, poor, Jewish, listening to a language he cannot yet understand.

That outsider status – starting in Dvinsk and deepening in America – becomes part of his identity. He will never fully belong in Russia or Latvia, nor in America; never entirely in the Jewish community or the secular art scene. His paintings, hanging between earth and sky, between light and darkness, can be seen as landscapes of that in‑between space.

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From Marcus Rothkowitz to Mark Rothko

Fast‑forward a decade or so: the family have settled in Portland. Marcus is brilliant – he skips grades, graduates high school early, and wins a scholarship to Yale. At Yale, he encounters another form of exclusion. The college, like many elite American institutions of the time, enforces anti‑Jewish quotas and harbours an air of social snobbery. Rothko drops out before finishing, disillusioned, and heads for New York “to bum about and starve a bit”, as he later describes.

New York in the 1920s and 30s attracted artists and émigrés. Rothko attends life-drawing classes at the Art Students League and Parsons. One of his teachers, Max Weber, is a Russian-Jewish modernist who encourages young artists to see painting as a means for emotional and spiritual expression.

At this stage, Rothko’s work remains figurative. He depicts urban scenes, portraits, and mythological figures. However, the themes occupying his mind - exile, myth, mortality, violence - have deep origins in his childhood in Dvinsk and in the more recent trauma of leaving it.

Then the world turns darker again.

By the early 1940s, as news of the Nazi extermination of Europe’s Jews became widespread, Rothko’s art underwent a shift. He moves away from literal scenes towards what he calls “tragic and timeless” subjects, drawing on Greek myth, Christian iconography, and Jewish burial imagery. The horrors unfolding in places like Latvia – including Daugavpils, where the once‑huge Jewish community is almost entirely annihilated – weigh heavily on him.

Rothko never paints the Holocaust directly. Instead, he simplifies details. Rectangles of colour become the stage for emotions that cannot easily be illustrated: dread, grief, a lingering sense of catastrophe. For him, art is “an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risk”.

In mid‑century America, that risk included being Jewish. In 1940, with antisemitism rising in both Europe and the United States, he officially shortened his name from Marcus Rothkowitz to Mark Rothko – partly to sound less Jewish and partly more acceptable to galleries and collectors. He refuses, however, to be labelled a “Jewish artist” or to fit neatly into the abstract expressionist category; the outsider position remains.

And yet, there is a remarkable tenderness in his life and work.

For over twenty years, Rothko taught art to children at the Brooklyn Jewish Centre. His students – mostly from kindergarten to eighth grade – know him not as a tortured genius but simply as “Rothkie”, “a big bear of a man, the friendliest, nicest, warmest member of the entire school”. He writes about children’s art with genuine admiration, praising its freshness, authenticity, and emotional intensity. Children, he notes, instinctively use perspective and geometry without realising it; they show that everyone can make art, that it is as elemental as speaking or singing.

One way to consider his path is this: a boy from Dvinsk, immersed in Talmudic logic and political debate, traumatised by exile and antisemitism, grows into a man who spends his days trying to help American children access that same primal language of expression without fear. The paintings in the major museums – those hovering veils of colour – are the most visible legacy. But those classrooms in Brooklyn form another, quieter bridge between Daugavpils and New York.

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Coming home: the Rothko Museum in Daugavpils Fortress

For much of the 20th century, the art world regarded Rothko as an American painter. Catalogues frequently misidentify his birthplace as somewhere in Russia or even Lithuania. The fact that he was born here, in Dvinsk/Daugavpils, remains a footnote.

Latvia itself, scarred by war, occupation, and the Holocaust, is slow to reclaim him. The fortress becomes a Soviet military base; Daugavpils transforms into a Russified industrial city, its pre‑war Jewish community largely erased.

That began to change in the early 2000s after independence was regained. Around 2002, the idea of establishing a Mark Rothko centre in Daugavpils took shape. Local curator Farida Zaletilo and others lobby the city council, the Latvian Ministry of Culture, the European Union – and, importantly, Rothko’s children – to support a project that would both honour the artist and help rejuvenate a struggling city on the country’s periphery.

The chosen location is inspired: the old artillery arsenal, built in 1833, inside Daugavpils Fortress. A place designed for war is to become a house of colour! After a major reconstruction, funded largely by EU regional development money with co‑financing from the city and state, the Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art Centre opened its doors on 24 April 2013. On its 110th anniversary, the town where Marcus Rothkowitz was born finally welcomed back Mark Rothko.

Today, the institution has been rebranded simply as the Rothko Museum, but the mission remains the same: a multifunctional centre for contemporary art, culture and education, and the only place in Eastern Europe where visitors can see original works by Rothko himself. The museum is open from Tuesday to Sunday, all year. It is a beautiful building to house the Rothko paintings and pictures, and showcase Latvian Abstract Expressionists and ceramic creators.

So, what is it like to visit?

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Inside the Rothko Museum: a walk‑through

You enter through heavy doors into the brick‑vaulted space of the former arsenal. The museum unfolds in a series of long, high rooms: polished concrete, dark walls, the faint smell of old brick and fresh paint.

At the end of the building is the Rothko Space – a quiet, almost chapel‑like room where up to six original paintings from different stages of his career are on display, on loan from his children. You might encounter an early figurative work like “Mother and Child” from 1934, painted not long after his years as a teacher, alongside mythic canvases such as “Sacrifice of Iphigenia” or “The High Priest,” and then the classic colour field paintings like “No. 7 (orange and chocolate)” from 1957 or “No. 10 (brown, black, sienna on dark wine)” from 1963.

The lighting is subdued. Benches invite you to sit. Labels are unobtrusive. The room requests your time and attention - exactly what Rothko insisted on when he specified how his works should be displayed.

Next door to the Rothko Space, an exhibition traces his life story: from the streets of Dvinsk/Daugavpils to Portland and New York; his teaching career; the Seagram murals; the Houston chapel. Archival photographs show a serious boy, a bearded teacher among children, a man in paint‑splattered clothes staring intensely at his own work. There is a Silence Room, a nod to Rothko’s own quasi‑religious aspirations for his art – he once said there was “no such thing as good painting about nothing.” Visitors sit, breathe, contemplate.

Beyond the biographical core, the museum hosts a rolling programme of contemporary art exhibitions by Latvian and international artists: painting, photography, ceramics, textiles. There is a library, a video hall, conference rooms, and a café. Upstairs and in nearby buildings, residencies and symposia bring artists from around the world to live and work inside the fortress.

A short walk away, in the Martinsons House – another historic building in the fortress complex – a permanent display is dedicated to the outstanding ceramic artist Pēteris Martinsons.

On some level, this is a very Latvian story. It involves EU funding applications, careful negotiations with heirs, and a municipality trying to reinvent itself through culture. But at its core, it is something simpler: a city saying, “One of the most important artists of the 20th century was born here. That matters – to us and to the world”.

Sitting in front of those paintings, within a fortress built for Tsarist troops, in a town where half the population was once Jewish and then nearly wiped out, is an unexpectedly moving experience. The Irish-born, raised in Britain, naturalised American artist Sean Scully has spoken and written about how Rothko’s paintings offer powerful experiences for viewers and enrich life by providing an artistic encounter that transcends mere wall decoration. He has discussed his aim to humanise abstraction so that even people who are not art experts can appreciate and benefit from it, and he often highlights the profound, enriching impact a Rothko painting can have on a viewer’s life.

The colours on the canvas – those shimmering veils of orange and wine, black and brown – are not Latgale landscapes in any literal sense. And yet, with the snow outside and the Daugava beyond the ramparts, it is difficult not to feel that something of this place has seeped into them.

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What else to see in Daugavpils: a short guide

So you have made the journey to Daugavpils, maybe by train from Rīga like me, or by car or bus. You have spent a couple of hours in the Rothko Museum. What next?

This is a brief, story‑driven guide for those who may wish to follow in my footsteps.

1. Daugavpils Fortress: a city within a city.

Step back out of the museum and into the wider fortress.

Daugavpils Fortress is one of the best-preserved bastion-style fortifications in Northern Europe, covering approximately 150 hectares - essentially a self-sufficient city with its own grid of ten streets, around eighty historic buildings, ramparts, ravelins, and moats. From above, the fort has been likened to a sun, a star, even a turtle or a bat. The shape is not whimsical; it is purely military logic, designed to eliminate “dead zones” where attackers might hide.

Many of the buildings are at different stages of restoration. Alongside the Rothko Museum and Martinsons’ House, you'll find a fortress culture and information centre, a bat research centre (yes, there is a sizeable bat colony), and exhibition spaces dedicated to local history and military technology. You can walk the ramparts, peer into old ammunition stores, and imagine Tsar Alexander I’s soldiers pacing these same lines before marching off to face Napoleon.

2. Church Hill – four confessions on one slope.

Leave the fortress and head towards Baznīcu kalns, Church Hill. 

Within a few minutes’ walk, four different houses of worship stand nearby: the monumental blue-and-white Orthodox Saints Boris and Gleb Cathedral – the largest Orthodox church in Latvia; the neo-Gothic Lutheran Martin Luther Cathedral; the Roman Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary; and the Old Believers’ prayer house. Phew! On a clear day, the domes and spires rise above the apartment blocks like something from a 19th-century engraving. It serves as a visual shorthand for Daugavpils’ layered identity: Russian, Polish, Latvian, Jewish, Old Believer, Catholic, Lutheran – all piled upon one another.

Rothko himself, of course, grew up in a very different religious landscape – intensely Jewish, with Orthodox and Hasidic currents alongside secular socialism and Zionism. But to stand on Church Hill today is to feel, in miniature, the cultural crossroads that shaped his native city.

3. The centre: Unity Square, Shmakovka and the tram.

From Church Hill, walk down into the city centre and Vienības laukums – Unity Square – a wide open space established in the 1930s as part of an ambitious inter-war modernisation of Daugavpils.

Here you will find the local theatre, the city and regional museum, and the Shmakovka Museum, dedicated to a very Latgalian subject: the region’s potent homemade spirit.

The streets surrounding the square showcase Daugavpils’ architectural diversity: red-brick 19th-century buildings, some art nouveau facades, Soviet apartment blocks, and the occasional modern glass addition.

For a different perspective, hop on a tram.

Daugavpils still operates its own small tram network, and there is even a special city tour called “Daugavpils through tram windows”, which uses a vintage tram car. I’m sure I saw it running, even in November! The route passes the historic centre, the fortress, Church Hill, and extends towards Stropu Lake.

This is a fine irony: the notion of rattling through a former Russian garrison town on a Soviet‑era tram, following the trail of an abstract painter whose works now sell for tens of millions.

4. Industrial heritage: shot factory and tower.

Industrial archaeology enthusiasts should not miss the Daugavpils shot factory – a 19th-century complex where lead shot for ammunition was made by pouring molten lead from the top of a tall tower into water below. The shot tower is believed to be one of the oldest still-operating towers of its kind in Europe. Tours explain the process and offer views over the city.

It is difficult not to think, somewhat gloomily, of the fortress walls and military history, of wars that forced families like the Rothkowitzes to flee. Lead shot and colour fields are only a few tram stops apart.

5. Nature breaks: Stropu Lake and Daugavas Loki.

If time permits, visit Stropu ezers, Stropu Lake, with its forests and freshly renovated promenade – a popular location for swimming and strolls in summer.

Further afield, the Daugavas Loki nature park protects a particularly scenic, winding stretch of the Daugava with high banks and ancient hillfort sites. For a weekend trip, this offers you a chance to experience the great river that, indirectly, gives Daugavpils – the “castle on the Daugava” – its name.

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Colours of exile and return

In the Rothko Room back in the fortress, the labels on the wall are simple: title, date, medium. They do not mention Daugavpils or Dvinsk, the Pale of Settlement, the trams or the shot tower, the synagogue courtyards, or the anti‑Semitic leaflets fluttering in the streets.

And yet, standing before those colourful works of art, knowing that the boy who became Mark Rothko once ran through muddy Latgalian streets not far from here, alters the way they are perceived.

The paintings no longer float in the airy heights of New York lofts and Manhattan galleries, or world-class museums like the Tate Modern in London. Instead, they are anchored, albeit subtly, in a specific place: a fortress town on the Daugava, a Jewish half‑city that nearly vanished, a modern Latvian municipality that has chosen to reinvent itself as the guardian of a global artist’s legacy.

I’m returning on the train from Daugavpils for the three-hour return journey to Rīga. I leave you with two invitations. One is to visit the Rothko Museum and Daugavpils: to walk the ramparts, sit in the Silence Room, take the tram past Church Hill, and raise a glass of shmakovka in Unity Square. The other is more personal for you: to revisit Rothko’s paintings – in Daugavpils, London, New York – and to see, behind the shimmering rectangles and deep horizons, the outlines of a small boy in a fortress city, learning early that the world can be both luminous and dangerous.

The colours of exile and return are not solely Latvian, Jewish, or American. They are universal. And perhaps that is why, more than half a century after Rothko’s death, people like me still sit before his canvases and feel, often without words, that something in them recognises something in him.

[Photograph from the museum taken by an Englishman in Latvia. Music by Dvir Silverstone from Pixabay]