Quote

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

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
Real
Environment
Bones
Reservations
Life
Pleasure
Shape
Abstraction
Interest
Flesh
Vulnerability
Point
Picture
Drawn
Pain
Shapes
Area
Doe
Areas
Breath
Without
View
Breaths
Pulsating
Nothing
Views
Provide
Abstractions

More quotes by Mark Rothko

Image
A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent.
Mark Rothko
Image
There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.
Mark Rothko
Image
The reason for my painting large canvases is that I want to be intimate and human.
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
Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit.
Mark Rothko
Image
The abstract artist has given material existence to many unseen worlds and tempi.
Mark Rothko
Image
The picture must be... a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.
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
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
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
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 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
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
My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes
Mark Rothko
Image
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
Image
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
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
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.
Mark Rothko