Rothko is a short, sonorous name just the way America likes them. "On September 25, 1903, Marcus Rotkovitch, the fourth child of the city's pharmacist, Yacov Rotkovitch, and his wife Anna Goldin, was born in Dvinsk (now Daugavpils in Latvia)," says Annie Cohen-Solal in her vigorous biography, published by Actes Sud in 2013. The historian immediately places the fate of this youngest son of a liberal family in the turmoil of the pogroms that threatened the Jews, even well-established, of the Russian Empire, who were forced to live within the area of residence.
At the age of 10, he left to join his father and older brothers in America. He arrived at Ellis Island with his mother and sister in late 1913. In 1938, worried about the rise of Nazism in Europe, the man became an American citizen. In 1940, he began to call himself Mark Rothko, but this change was not made official until 1959. "Not so much to disguise one's origins, because the name remains Jewish to American ears...
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