Mark Rothko Quotes
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Silence is so accurate.
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I am dealing not with the particular anecdote, but rather with the Spirit of Myth, which is generic to all myths at all times.
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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 pictorial equivalent for man's new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.
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Like the Cubists before them, the abstractionists felt a beautiful thing in perceiving how the medium can, of its own accord, carry one into the unknown, that is to the discovery of new structures. What an inspiration the medium is..
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It's a risky business to send a picture out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent who could extend their affliction universally!
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..one must agree with Rilke when he says that with 'nothing can one touch a work of art so little as with critical words..' .It was Marcel Duchamps who was critical, when he drew a moustache on the 'Mona Lisa'. And so was Mondrian when he dreamed of the dissolution of painting, sculpture, and architecture into a transcendent ensemble.
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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.
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On shapes:
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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.
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I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.
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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.
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..it was with the utmost reluctance that I found the figure could not serve my purposes.. .But a time came when none of us could use the figure without mutilating it. his quote in 1959, looking back to the 1930's
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I will say without reservations that from my point of view there can be no abstractions. Any shape or area that has not the pulsating concreteness of real flesh and bones, its vulnerability to pleasure or pain is nothing at all. Any picture that does not provide the environment in which the breath of life can be drawn does not interest me.
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Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.
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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.
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It was not that the figure had been removed, not that the figures had been swept away, but the symbols for the figures, and in turn the shapes in the later canvases were substitutes for the figures.. ..these new shapes say.. ..what the symbols said. Rothko, explaining Seitz his new way of painting during the mid-1940s
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That is why we profess a spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.
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A painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience.
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One does not paint for design students or historians but for human beings, and the reaction in human terms is the only thing that is really satisfactory to the artist. in conversation with W.C. Seitz
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p. 168
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We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.
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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.
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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.
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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.