Mark Rothko

American abstract expressionist / colour field painter, poet and anarchist. Was born to Jewish parents in Czarist Russia (now part of Latvia). His father, taking Marcus' elder brothers, emigrated to America so his sons could escape being drafted into the Imperial Russian Army. Marcus, together with his mother and sister, joined them in 1913. In Portland, Oregon, he learned English (his fourth language after Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew) and joined in the political debates in the local Jewish community centre, becoming passionate about the worker's movement and women's right to contraception. It was in this atmosphere of radical workers' and IWW meetings, with speeches by the likes of Bill Haywood and Emma Goldman (attending her lectures in Portland in August 1915), that his anarchism was founded. I was also where he also developed his strong oratorical skills, something he would later deploy in defence of Surrealism. He would also later join the anti-fascist, anti-capitalist Artists Union in the early 1930s.

Shortly before taking his own life on February 25, 1970, as he grappled with protracted health problems, tormented by depression and physically debilitated, he declared: "I am still an anarchist!"