Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Mark Rothko
Age: 66 †
Born: 1903
Born: September 25
Died: 1970
Died: February 25
Artist
Drawer
Painter
University Teacher
Dvinsk
Marcus Rothkowitz
Society
Disguise
Order
Association
Familiar
Must
Destroy
Every
Complete
Pulverized
Things
Aspect
Associations
Identity
Finite
Environment
Increasingly

More quotes by Mark Rothko

Image
My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes
Mark Rothko
Image
I am here to make you think. . . . I am not here to make pretty pictures!
Mark Rothko
Image
Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama.
Mark Rothko
Image
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
Image
Many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow.
Mark Rothko
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.
Mark Rothko
Image
There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend: One day, the black will swallow the red.
Mark Rothko
Image
Small pictures since the Renaissance are like novels large pictures are like dramas in which one participates in a direct way.
Mark Rothko
Image
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
Image
To me art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risk.
Mark Rothko
Image
The reason for my painting large canvases is that I want to be intimate and human.
Mark Rothko
Image
Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit.
Mark Rothko
Image
The reason for my painting large canvases is that I want to be intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command.
Mark Rothko
Image
There is more power in telling little than in telling all.
Mark Rothko
Image
(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
Image
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
Image
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