Mark Rothko Quotes (16 Quotes)


    I have on occasion successfully dealt with this problem by tending to crowd the show rather than making it spare.

    Since my pictures are large, colorful, and unframed, and since museum walls are usually immense and formidable, there is the danger that the pictures relate themselves as decorative areas to the walls.

    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.

    From him I got my love for music, and for many years I was the classical music critic for magazines that have since folded, such as Musical America and High Fidelity. During the last year of his life, I would come to the studio, and he would arrange a corner for me with a canvas and paints. I don't think that I saw him paint. He didn't allow anyone to watch him. That was his own private affair.

    There will be an exhibition, ... The question is when and how large. It is difficult to convince collectors and museums to send the paintings to Israel. The question of insurance presents difficulties for the project, but we intend to do such an exhibition within two to three years.


    I also hang the largest pictures so that they must be first encountered at close quarters, so that the first experience is to be within the picture.

    There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.

    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.

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

    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.

    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.

    Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.


    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.

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

    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.


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