Top 46 Mark Rothko Quotes
#1. And last, it may be worthwhile trying to hang something beyond the partial wall because some of the pictures do very well in a confined space.
Mark Rothko
#2. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.
Mark Rothko
#3. Look, it's my misery that I have to paint this kind of painting, it's your misery that you have to love it, and the price of the misery is thirteen hundred and fifty dollars.
Mark Rothko
#4. Pictures must be miraculous: the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended.
Mark Rothko
#5. The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental.
Mark Rothko
#6. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.
Mark Rothko
#7. The progression of a painter's work ... will be toward clarity; toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer ... to achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood.
Mark Rothko
#8. Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.
Mark Rothko
#9. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate these basic human emotions.
Mark Rothko
#10. To me art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risk.
Mark Rothko
#11. My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes
Mark Rothko
#12. If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas.
Mark Rothko
#13. I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene, whether in friendship or mere observation, that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.
Mark Rothko
#14. With us the disguise must be complete. The familiar identity of things has to be pulverized in order to destroy the finite associations with which our society increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our environment.
Mark Rothko
#15. It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism.
Mark Rothko
#16. The abstract artist has given material existence to many unseen worlds and tempi.
Mark Rothko
#17. The most interesting painting is one that expresses more of what one thinks than of what one sees
Mark Rothko
#18. I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing, and stretching one's arms again transcendental experiences became possible.
Mark Rothko
#19. This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative; and have been painted in a scale of normal living rather than an institutional scale.
Mark Rothko
#20. I don't express myself in my paintings. I express my not-self.
Mark Rothko
#21. We are concerned with similar states of consciousness and relationship to the world ... If previous abstractions paralleled the scientific and objective preoccupations of our times, ours are finding a pictoral equivalent for man's new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.
Mark Rothko
#22. I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.
Mark Rothko
#23. A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent.
Mark Rothko
#24. We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.
Mark Rothko
#25. Many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow.
Mark Rothko
#26. If you are only moved by color relationships, you are missing the point. I am interested in expressing the big emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom.
Mark Rothko
#27. (I am) dealing not with the particular anecdote, but rather with the Spirit of Myth, which is generic to all myths at all times.
Mark Rothko
#28. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again.
Mark Rothko
#29. Small pictures since the Renaissance are like novels; large pictures are like dramas in which one participates in a direct way.
Mark Rothko
#30. the constant repetition of falsehood is more convincing than the demonstration of truth.
Mark Rothko
#32. I also hang the pictures low rather than high, and particularly in the case of the largest ones, often as close to the floor as is feasible, for that is the way they are painted.
Mark Rothko
#33. I am here to make you think ... I am not here to make pretty pictures!
Mark Rothko
#34. There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend: One day, the black will swallow the red.
Mark Rothko
#36. Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama.
Mark Rothko
#37. The picture must be ... a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.
Mark Rothko
#38. The artist invites the spectator to take a journey within the realm of the canvas ... Without taking the journey, the spectator has really missed the essential experience of the picture.
Mark Rothko
#39. A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.
Mark Rothko
#40. That is why we profess a spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.
Mark Rothko
#41. I use colors that have already been experienced through the light of day and through the state of mind of the total man. In other words, my colors are not colors that are laboratory tools which are isolated from all accidentals or impurities so that they have a specified identity or purity.
Mark Rothko
#42. There is more power in telling little than in telling all.
Mark Rothko
#43. For, while the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done.
Mark Rothko
#44. You think my paintings are calm, like windows in some cathedral? You should look again. I'm the most violent of all the American painters. Behind those colours there hides the final cataclysm.
Mark Rothko
#45. This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.
Mark Rothko
#46. The people that weep before my paintings are having the same religious experience that I had when I painted it.
Mark Rothko
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