We are concerned with similar states of consciousness and relationship to the world.. .If previous abstractions paralleled the scientific and objecti… - Mark Rothko

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 strange or unfamiliar is transcendental. The unfriendliness of society to his activity is difficult for the artists to accept. Yet this very hostility can act as a lever for true liberation.. .Both the sense of community and of security depend on the familiar. Free of them, transcendental experiences become possible.

[I]t was with the utmost reluctance that I found the figure could not serve my purposes...But a time came when none of us could use the figure without mutilating it. [his quote in 1959, looking back to the 1930s]

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.