A Man and His Edge : MARK ROTHKO: A Biography, <i> By James E.B. Breslin (University of Chicago Press: $39.95; 712 pp.)</i>

On Feb. 25, 1970, Mark Rothko was found dead in his New York studio, a pool of blood spreading out on the floor beneath him, his wrists slashed. Sixty-seven years old, he had been in declining health for several years, was separated from his second wife and living alone. Violent deaths create mythologies of their own and unfortunately the dramatic way in which Rothko died has perhaps exerted a larger influence over the way in which his work is viewed than the far less dramatic way in which he lived.

Born Markus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Russia, the boy immigrated with his mother and brothers to Portland, Ore., when Markus was 10, following the path of his father who had made the journey three years earlier--and who died just months after the family arrived. Markus then left Portland for Yale and soon abandoned the academic life for that of a struggling young artist in New York City, adopting the moniker Mark Rothko.

He was a portraitist of the human soul. Subverting the ideology of the Surrealists and the ethos of the Luminists, Rothko invented an entirely new vocabulary for American painting. His self-contained, soft-edged rectangles of color redefined modern American art and made him one of the most significant Abstract Expressionists. Now, his life and his death are the subject of James E.B. Breslin’s lengthy, if thorough, biography.

In Breslin’s view, Rothko never recovered from the combined losses of his native country and his father: “Most of all, he resented his enforced migration. He ‘was never able to forgive,’ he angrily declared, his ‘transplantation to a land where he never felt entirely at home.’ ” Mark Rothko was an outsider who perceived himself as persecuted because of his Jewishness, and because of his strong opinions, compromised by the greed and ego of others. He was an outsider who wanted in, and once inside, found no comfort, found instead that there was no inside: “Rothko wanted to be understood; he wanted to recognized , to be seen in the deepest sense. Yet recognition entailed its own dangers: if he were understood, then he was no longer an outsider--he lost his edge.”

A man who constantly needed to be in control, Rothko asserted himself with nearly obsessive fervor over the environments and circumstances under which his work would be viewed. Declining to appear in the 1952 Whitney Annual, Rothko cited his “deep sense of responsibility for the life my pictures will lead out in the world.” And when Elaine de Kooning wrote an article about his work, Rothko went over it word by word, rewriting it with her. About the experience De Kooning said: “Mark really wanted not only to control his paintings, but he wanted to control what was said about his paintings.” Rothko worried that if not displayed under the right conditions his work would be demoted to the level of decoration, while simultaneously he was petrified that he would be revealed to be a fraud instead of a great painter. In 1959 upon his acceptance of a commission to create paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, Rothko declared, “I accepted this assignment with strictly malicious intentions. I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.” Rothko worked on the murals for two years and then after taking his wife to the restaurant one night, withdrew the paintings and returned the money he’d been paid, saying, “Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a painting of mine.”

Clearly, Rothko’s personality was a complicated one; anxious, depressed, consumed with himself, filled with enormous self-doubt and a need for approval, Rothko was also an intensely private person. One of the least autobiographical painters of his generation, it could be said that his life’s work was dedicated to freeing himself from the existing limits of representation and interpretation. Mark Rothko’ mature works are elegant if brutal reflections of those parts of the self that are so rarely revealed or fully articulated. In their radiant veils of color the paintings give full expression to the extremes of man’s existence, reflecting the tragic ecstasy of the human experience, the melancholia of mortality.

“Silence is so accurate,” Rothko once said, and perhaps he was right. Breslin’s 683-page biography raises numerous questions not just about the life of Mark Rothko but about the nature of biography, especially as it relates to modern art. There has been much discussion about why there are so few biographies of modern artists; yet writing these biographies has become an increasingly complicated endeavor. Within Mark Rothko’s lifetime, the practice of art writing was already growing from the small group of artists and critics, as described by Breslin, into an interdisciplinary community taking on increasingly complex explorations of theoretical positions filtering through various sociological, economic, and political states as well the semiotic, psychoanalytical, and deconstructionist positions. Ideally, Breslin’s position outside the progression of contemporary discourse should have been liberating, giving him the freedom to explore Rothko’s life and work in ways which the structure of current criticism would make difficult. But in attempting to document the life of a man whose work focused on transcending the conventionalized limits of representation, James E.B. Breslin, a professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of two previous volumes, “From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry 1945-1965,” and “William Carlos Williams: An American Artist,” has extended beyond his reach. Subjecting an artist such as Mark Rothko to the kind of investigation and language he abhorred, binding him to the mundane details of a regular life might be of value it to clarify or enhance our understanding of his work. Ultimately, despite Breslin’s intensive effort--the book is well researched and thick with documentation (nearly 1,500 footnotes)--his weighty tome is less a biography and more an exhausting if repetitious report. In the end, Breslin seems unable to evoke Rothko’s powerful and compelling personality, the majesty of his paintings, and/or the social and cultural climate in which he lived.