Rothko Quotes

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

Great works of art in all cultures succeed in capturing within the constraints of their form both the pathos of anguish and a vision of its resolution. Take, for example, the languorous sentences of Proust or the haiku of Basho, the late quartets and sonatas of Beethoven, the tragicomic brushwork of Sengai or the daunting canvases of Rothko, the luminous self-portraits of Rembrandt and Hakuin. Such works achieve their resolution not through consoling or romantic images whereby anguish is transcended. They accept anguish without being overwhelmed by it. They reveal anguish as that which gives beauty its dignity and depth. ~ Stephen Batchelor

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

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

For, 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is why we profess a spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art. ~ Mark Rothko

Pictures must be miraculous. ~ Mark Rothko

(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

When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing. No galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet, it was a golden age, for we all had nothing to lose and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity, consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large I shall not venture to discuss. But I do know, that many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow. We must all hope we find them. ~ Mark Rothko

There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend: One day, the black will swallow the red. ~ Mark Rothko

The Sleeping

I have imagined all this:
In 1940 my parents were in love
And living in the loft on West 10th
Above Mark Rothko who painted cabbage roses
On their bedroom walls the night they got married.

I can guess why he did it.
My mother's hair was the color of yellow apples
And she wore a velvet hat with her pajamas.

I was not born yet. I was remote as starlight.
It is hard for me to imagine that
My parents made love in a roomful of roses
And I wasn't there.

But now I am. My mother is blushing.
This is the wonderful thing about art.
It can bring back the dead. It can wake the sleeping
As it might have late that night
When my father and mother made love above Rothko
Who lay in the dark thinking Roses, Roses, Roses. ~ Lynn Emanuel

You said how Michelangelo was a manic-depressive who portrayed himself as a flayed martyr in his painting. Henri Matisse gave up being a lawyer because of appendicitis. Robert Schumann only began composing after his right hand became paralyzed and ended his career as a concert pianist. (...) You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Bronte sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O'Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

"According to Thomas Mann," Peter said, "'Great artists are great invalids. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

I like to keep my dreams attainable. Eat cheese, sleep on a nice bed, have my work in the same museum as Rothko--the usual. ~ Emily Lloyd-Jones

It is really one of the most serious faults which can be found with the whole conception of democracy, that its cultural function must move on the basis of the common denominator. Such a point of view indeed would make a mess of all of the values which we have developed for examining works of art. It would address one end of education in that it would consider that culture which was available to everyone, but in that achievement it would eliminate culture itself.
This is surely the death of all thought.
This quote is taken from "The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art" by Mark Rothko, written 1940-1 and published posthumously in 2004 by Yale University Press, pp.126-7. ~ Mark Rothko

Profs who go to Knossos to look for books on Phobos or Kronos go on to jot down monophthongs (kof or rho) from two monoglot scrolls on Thoth, old god of Copts - both scrolls torn from hornbooks, now grown brown from mold. Profs who gloss works of Woolf, Gogol, Frost or Corot look for books from Knopf: Oroonoko or Nostromo - not Hopscotch (nor Tlooth). Profs who do schoolwork on Pollock look for photobooks on Orozco or Rothko (two tomfools who throw bold colors, blotch on blotch, onto tondos of dropcloth). ~ Christian Bök

He has. A fucking. Rothko. Over the fireplace ~ Jean Hanff Korelitz

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

the Temple was rebuilt, but by then the religion of Israel had been marked forever by the piety of the exile. Alongside the single Temple, where blood sacrifice was celebrated, arose numerous synagogues, places for meeting and for prayer, and the dominium of the priests yielded to the growing influence of the Pharisees and Scribes, men of the book and of study. In 70 A.D., the Roman legions again destroyed the Temple. But the learned rabbi Joahannah ben-Zakkaj, slipped covertly out of Jerusalem through the siege and obtained permission from Vespasian to continue the teaching of the Torah in the city of Jamnia. The temple has never been rebuilt since, and study, the Talmud, has become the real temple of Israel.24 This complex relationship to the Talmud is in fact a key to understanding the life and work of Mark Rothko. ~ Annie Cohen-Solal

A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience. ~ Mark Rothko

I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene, whether in friendship or mere observation, that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface. ~ Mark Rothko

We are concerned with similar states of consciousness and relationship to the world ... If previous abstractions paralleled the scientific and objective preoccupations of our times, ours are finding a pictoral equivalent for man's new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self. ~ Mark Rothko

You think my paintings are calm, like windows in some cathedral? You should look again. I'm the most violent of all the American painters. Behind those colours there hides the final cataclysm. ~ Mark Rothko

I am here to make you think ... I am not here to make pretty pictures! ~ Mark Rothko

I use colors that have already been experienced through the light of day and through the state of mind of the total man. In other words, my colors are not colors that are laboratory tools which are isolated from all accidentals or impurities so that they have a specified identity or purity. ~ Mark Rothko

You would have loved Jackson. He was a downtown guy, a real Bohemian. No banker's hours for him, believe you me. Every night the drinking and the talking and the fighting and the dancing and the staying up late; like everyone's romantic idea of what an artist ought to be: the anti-Rothko... At his worst you still loved him though; you loved him because he loved art so much... He thought it mattered. He thought painting mattered... Does not the poignancy stop your heart?... How could this story not end in tragedy?

Goya said, 'We have Art that we may not perish from Truth.'... Pollock saw some truth. Then he didn't have art to protect him any more... Who could survive that?

I was walking up to my house last week and this couple was passing. Lady looks in the window, says: 'I wonder who owns all the Rothkos.'... Just like that I'm a noun. A Rothko. ~ John Logan

This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative; and have been painted in a scale of normal living rather than an institutional scale. ~ Mark Rothko

Pictures must be miraculous: the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended. ~ Mark Rothko

We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. ~ Mark Rothko

ROTHKO: (Explodes) 'Pretty.' 'Beautiful.' 'Nice.' 'Fine.' That's our life now! Everything's 'fine'. We put on the funny nose and glasses and slip on the banana peel and the TV makes everything happy and everyone's laughing all the time, it's all so goddamn funny, it's our constitutional right to be amused all the time, isn't it? We're a smirking nation, living under the tyranny of 'fine.' How are you? Fine.. How was your day? Fine. How are you feeling? Fine. How did you like the painting? Fine. What some dinner? Fine ... Well, let me tell you, everything is not fine!!
HOW ARE YOU?! ... HOW WAS YOUR DAY?! ... HOW ARE YOU FEELING? Conflicted. Nuanced. Troubled. Diseased. Doomed. I am not fine. We are not fine. We are anything but fine. ~ John Logan

I have always dreamed of bringing an exhibit of Mark Rothko to Moscow. ~ Dasha Zhukova

I've always worn a hat when I work. I think it also comes from a picture of Rothko I saw with a painter's hat on. ~ Brice Marden

My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes ~ Mark Rothko

But a generation that does not aspire to seriousness, to meaning, is unworthy to walk in the shadow of those who have gone before, I mean those who have struggled and surmounted, I mean those who have aspired, I mean Rembrandt, I mean Turner, I mean Michelangelo and Matisse ... I mean obviously Rothko. ~ John Logan

We both had wanted to see a Mark Rothko exhibit at the Yale Art Gallery but, because of a labor dispute, some of the university's buildings, including the museum, were closed. As Bill and I walked by, he decided he could get us in if we offered to pick up the litter that had accumulated in the gallery's courtyard. Watching him talk our way in was the first time I saw his persuasiveness in action. We had the entire museum to ourselves. We wandered through the galleries talking about Rothko and twentieth-century art. I admit to being surprised at his interest in and knowledge of subjects that seemed, at first, unusual for a Viking from Arkansas. We ended up in the museum's courtyard, where I sat in the large lap of Henry Moore's sculpture Drape Seated Woman while we talked until dark. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton

Mark Rothko once wrote, "Silence is so accurate." We ~ Nicholas Tanek

The artist invites the spectator to take a journey within the realm of the canvas ... Without taking the journey, the spectator has really missed the essential experience of the picture. ~ Mark Rothko

It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them. ~ Mark Rothko

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

Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama. ~ Mark Rothko

There is more power in telling little than in telling all. ~ Mark Rothko