Quotes by Mark Rothko

“Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.”

“The myth holds us, therefore, not through its romantic flavor, not the remembrance of beauty of some bygone age, not through the possibilities of fantasy, but because it expresses to us something real and existing in ourselves, as it was to those who first stumbled upon the symbols to give them life.”

“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.”

“Silence is so accurate.”

“Small pictures since the Renaissance are like novels; large pictures are like dramas in which one participates in a direct way.”

“That is why we profess a spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.”

“Since my pictures are large, colorful, and unframed, and since museum walls are usually immense and formidable, there is the danger that the pictures relate themselves as decorative areas to the walls.”

“There will be an exhibition, ... The question is when and how large. It is difficult to convince collectors and museums to send the paintings to Israel. The question of insurance presents difficulties for the project, but we intend to do such an exhibition within two to three years.”

“ From him I got my love for music, and for many years I was the classical music critic for magazines that have since folded, such as Musical America and High Fidelity. During the last year of his life, I would come to the studio, and he would arrange a corner for me with a canvas and paints. I dont think that I saw him paint. He didnt allow anyone to watch him. That was his own private affair.”

“I have on occasion successfully dealt with this problem by tending to crowd the show rather than making it spare.”

It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching ones arms again.

Im not an abstractionist. Im not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. Im interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.

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.

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.

If you are only moved by color relationships, you are missing the point. I am interested in expressing the big emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom.

You’ve got sadness in you, I’ve got sadness in me – and my works of art are places where the two sadnesses can meet, and therefore both of us need to feel less sad.

It is really one of the most serious faults which can be found with the whole conception of democracy, that its cultural function must move on the basis of the common denominator. Such a point of view indeed would make a mess of all of the values which we have developed for examining works of art. It would address one end of education in that it would consider that culture which was available to everyone, but in that achievement it would eliminate culture itself.This is surely the death of all thought.This quote is taken from The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art by Mark Rothko, written 1940-1 and published posthumously in 2004 by Yale University Press, pp.126-7.

It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them.

A picture lives by companionship. 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.

Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.