Quote

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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Mark Rothko
Age: 66 †
Born: 1903
Born: September 25
Died: 1970
Died: February 25
Artist
Drawer
Painter
University Teacher
Dvinsk
Marcus Rothkowitz
Direct
Participates
Novel
Dramas
Small
Renaissance
Since
Participation
Way
Novels
Like
Pictures
Drama
Large

More quotes by 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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Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit.
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The picture must be... a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.
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The reason for my painting large canvases is that I want to be intimate and human.
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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.
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My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes
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.
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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.
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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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While the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done.
Mark Rothko
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The abstract artist has given material existence to many unseen worlds and tempi.
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It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism.
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There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.
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.
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Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama.
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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The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions.. the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.
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 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