Which Abstract Expressionist artist died by suicide in 1970?

Mark Rothko was the Abstract Expressionist artist who died by suicide in 1970.

Rothko died on February 25, 1970, in New York City, aged 66. His assistant found him in his studio apartment after he had overdosed on barbiturates and cut an artery in his right arm with a razor. No suicide note was found.

Born Markus Rothkowitz in 1903 in Dvinsk, then part of the Russian Empire, Rothko emigrated to the United States with his family in 1913. He became one of the leading figures associated with Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, especially through large canvases of softly edged rectangular color regions.

The other artists in the choices are linked to different tragedies or later histories: Arshile Gorky died by suicide in 1948, while Jackson Pollock died in a 1956 car crash. Rothko’s late Black on Grays paintings are often read through the lens of his death, although scholars have cautioned against treating them simply as suicide notes.