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
american-artist close experience hang largest pictures within
I also hang the largest pictures so that they must be first encountered at close quarters, so that the first experience is to be within the picture.
areas danger decorative immense museum pictures relate since themselves walls
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.
lonely art men
When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing. No galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet, it was a golden age, for we all had nothing to lose and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity, consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large I shall not venture to discuss. But I do know, that many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow. We must all hope we find them.
anecdotes spirit myth
(I am) dealing not with the particular anecdote, but rather with the Spirit of Myth, which is generic to all myths at all times.
exotic strange realizing
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.
imagination common-sense world
This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.
intimacy creation instant
Pictures must be miraculous: the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended.
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.
looks fifty dollars
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.
american-artist archaic kinship profess
That is why we profess a spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.
american-artist intimate normal opposite painted pictures scale since
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.