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Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit.

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
Art
Anecdote
Anecdotes
Spirit

More quotes by 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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There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.
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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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
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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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My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes
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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If you are only moved by color relationships, you are missing the point. I am interested in expressing the big emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom.
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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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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I am here to make you think. . . . I am not here to make pretty pictures!
Mark Rothko
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There is more power in telling little than in telling all.
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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A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.
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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Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama.
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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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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The abstract artist has given material existence to many unseen worlds and tempi.
Mark Rothko
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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.
Mark Rothko