Quotes by Mark Rothko

“Feeling must have a medium in order to function at all; in the same way, thought must have symbols. It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium that we call a work of art that bri...”

“Drama moves us: conflict is an inherent pattern in reality. Harmony moves us too: faced as we are with ever imminent disorder. It is a powerful idea. Van Gogh's drama and Seurat's silent harmony we...”

“But the most common error among the whole-hearted abstractionists nowadays [in 1946] is to mistake the medium for an end in itself, instead of a means. On the other hand, the surrealists erred in s...”

“Like the Cubists before them, the abstractionists felt a beautiful thing in perceiving how the medium can, of its own accord, carry one into the unknown, that is to the discovery of new structures....”

“Like Rimbaud before them, the surrealists abandoned the aesthetic altogether; it takes a certain courage to leave poetry for Africa [as Rimbaud himself did]. They revealed their insight as essentia...”

“[O]ne must agree with Rilke when he says that with 'nothing can one touch a work of art so little as with critical words...'. It was Marcel Duchamps who was critical, when he drew a moustache on th...”

“I paint very large pictures. I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them however, - I think it appl...”

“Since I have a deep sense of responsibility for the life my pictures will lead out in the world, I will with gratitude accept any form of their exposition in which their life and meaning can be mai...”

“It's a risky business to send a picture out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent who could extend their affliction universally!”

“I am not an abstractionist...I am not interested in the relationships of color or form or anything else...I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on —...”

“I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.”

“[the first ingredient of his work]... is a clear preoccupation with death - intimations of mortality.”

“A painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience.”

“[I am] dealing not with the particular anecdote, but rather with the Spirit of Myth, which is generic to all myths at all times.”

“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 plea...”

“The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything s...”

“I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers. They have been created from the need for a group of actors who are able to move dramatically without embarrassment a...”

“The most important tool the artist fashions through constant practice is the faith in his ability to produce miracles when they are needed. Pictures must be miraculous; the instant one is completed...”

“- They are organisms with volition and a passion for self-assertion. - They move with internal freedom, and without need to conform with or to violate what is probable in the familiar world. - They...”

“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...”