Reclining Figure Looking Right 

Mark Rothko made this pencil drawing, Reclining Figure Looking Right. While we don't have a date, it likely comes from his early period in the United States, prior to his turn to abstraction in the late 1940s. Rothko came to maturity as an artist during the Great Depression, when social realism was a dominant mode. This sketch relates to that context, but it doesn't directly depict labor or poverty. Instead, we see a nude figure, rendered with loose, expressive lines. What is her social position? Is she an artist's model, a member of the leisure class, or a figure of Rothko's imagination? These are questions that we can’t definitively answer by looking at the artwork alone. Instead, we have to do some digging into the artist’s biography and the artistic institutions of the period. This kind of historical research helps us to understand the choices that artists make, as well as the social meanings that their art might have carried.