Mark Rothko Quotes

It was not that the figure had been removed, not that the figures had been swept away, but the symbols for the figures, and in turn the shapes in the later canvases were substitutes for the figures.. ..these new shapes say.. ..what the symbols said. [Rothko, explaining Seitz his new way of painting during the mid-1940s]

It is Cézanne's feeling that determined the form of his pictorial structure. It is his pictorial structure that gives off his feeling. If all his pictorial structures were to disappear from the world, so would a certain feeling.

One does not paint for design students or historians but for human beings, and the reaction in human terms is the only thing that is really satisfactory to the artist. [in conversation with W.C. Seitz]

For the first time a subject is present, not by virtue of its absence, but actually present, though its appearance is torn away, and only the structure bared. The Modern City! Precise, rectangular, squared, whether seen from above, below, or on the side; bright lights and sterilized life; Broadway, whites and blacks; and boogie-woogie; the underground music of the at once resigned and rebellious.. .Mondrian has left his white paradise, and entered the world. [1942, on the late painting Broadway Boogie Woogie of Piet Mondrian ]

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 maintained, and avoid all occasions where I think that this cannot be done.. ..unfortunately, there are few existing alternatives for the kind of activity which your museum represents. Nevertheless, in my own life at least, there must be some congruity between convictions and actions if I am to continue to function and work.

[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 the Mona Lisa. And so was Mondrian when he dreamed of the dissolution of painting, sculpture, and architecture into a transcendent ensemble.

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 applies to other painters I know -, is precisely because I want to be very 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.

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!

For me, Still's pictorial dramas are an extension of the Greek Persephone myth. As he himself has expressed it, his paintings are 'of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated'. Every shape becomes an organic entity, inviting the multiplicity of associations inherent in all living things. To me they form a theogony of the most elementary consciousness, hardly aware of itself beyond the will to live – a profound and moving experience. [in the catalogue introduction for the first one-man-show of Clyfford Still]

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 pictorial equivalent for man's new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.

The passions are a kind of thirst, inexorable and intense, for certain feelings or felt states. To find or invent 'objects' (which are, more strictly speaking, relational structures) whose felt quality satisfies the passions, - that for me is the activity of the artist, an activity which does not cease even in sleep. No wonder the artist is constantly placing and displacing, relating and rupturing relations; his task is to find a complex of qualities whose feeling is just right – veering toward the unknown and chaos, yet ordered and related in order to be apprehended.

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 supposing that one can do without a medium, that in attacking the medium one does not destroy just one means for getting into the unknown. Color and space relations constitute such a means because from them can be made structures which exhibit the various patterns of reality.

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.

The activity of the artist makes him less socially conditioned and more humans. It is then that he is disposed to revolution. Society stands against anarchy; the artist stands for the human against society; society therefore threats him As an anarchist. Society's logic is faulty, but its intimation of an enemy is not. Still, the social conflict with society is an incidental obstacle in the artist's path.

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 essentially moral in never forgetting for a moment that most living is a process of conforming to an established order which is inhuman in its drives and consequences. Their hatred sustained them through all the humiliating situations in which the modern artist find himself, and led them to conceptions beyond the reach of more passive souls. For them true 'poetry' was freedom from mechanical social responses. No wonder they loved the work of children and the insane – if not the creatures themselves.