Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko, born Markus Yakovlevich Rotkovich, was an American painter of Russian Jewish descent. Although Rothko himself refused to adhere to any art movement, he is generally identified as an abstract expressionist. With Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, he is one of the most famous postwar American artists...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth25 September 1903
CountryUnited States of America
color missing ifs
If you are moved only by the color relationships, then you miss the point.
pain real views
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.
littles
There is more power in telling little than in telling all.
imagination common-sense world
This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.
eye world companionship
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.
intimacy creation instant
Pictures must be miraculous: the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended.
way lows cases
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.
religious people emotion
The people that weep before my paintings are having the same religious experience that I had when I painted it.
wall space trying
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.
order identity association
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.
needs unexpected revelations
The picture must be... a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.
form not-interested colour
I'm not an abstractionist... I'm not interested in relationships of colour or form or anything else.
drama way renaissance
Small pictures since the Renaissance are like novels; large pictures are like dramas in which one participates in a direct way.
breathing silence solitude
It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again.