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There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.

Mark Rothko

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Mark Rothko
Age: 66 †
Born: 1903
Born: September 25
Died: 1970
Died: February 25
Artist
Drawer
Painter
University Teacher
Dvinsk
Marcus Rothkowitz
Painting
Artist
Nothing
Thing
Good

More quotes by Mark Rothko

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I am here to make you think. . . . I am not here to make pretty pictures!
Mark Rothko
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A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer
Mark Rothko
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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.
Mark Rothko
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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.
Mark Rothko
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We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.
Mark Rothko
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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
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My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes
Mark Rothko
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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.. ...(they) express something real and existing in ourselves.
Mark Rothko
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The abstract artist has given material existence to many unseen worlds and tempi.
Mark Rothko
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Small pictures since the Renaissance are like novels large pictures are like dramas in which one participates in a direct way.
Mark Rothko
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To me art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risk.
Mark Rothko
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Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama.
Mark Rothko
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The picture must be... a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.
Mark Rothko
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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
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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.
Mark Rothko
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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
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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.
Mark Rothko
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There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend: One day, the black will swallow the red.
Mark Rothko
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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.
Mark Rothko
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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