Mark Rothko Quotes

Quotes about:

• A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.

  Mark Rothko

  Painting

  134 Copy quote

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

  Mark Rothko

  Black, One Day, Red

  153 Copy quote

• The most interesting painting is one that expresses more of what one thinks than of what one sees

  Mark Rothko

  Thinking, Interesting, Painting

  135 Copy quote

• There is more power in telling little than in telling all.

  Mark Rothko

  Littles

  Mark Rothko, Miguel López-Remiro (2006). “Writings on Art”, p.126, Yale University Press

  104 Copy quote

• I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.

  Mark Rothko

  Photography, Art, Creativity

  142 Copy quote

• To me art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risk.

  Mark Rothko

  Courage, Art, Adventure

  157 Copy quote

• 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

  Religious, Color, People

  125 Copy quote

• I am here to make you think. . . . I am not here to make pretty pictures!

  Mark Rothko

  Thinking, Make You Think, Pretty Picture

  72 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Finals, Looks

  87 Copy quote

• Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit.

  Mark Rothko

  Art, Anecdotes, Spirit

  Mark Rothko, Miguel López-Remiro (2006). “Writings on Art”, p.45, Yale University Press

  87 Copy quote

• Silence is so accurate.

  Mark Rothko

  Silence, Serenity, Favourite

  86 Copy quote

• If you are only moved by color relationships, you are missing the point. I am interested in expressing the big emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom.

  Mark Rothko

  Color, Missing, Tragedy

  94 Copy quote

• 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

  Lonely, Art, Men

  111 Copy quote

• 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

  Artist, Journey, Essentials

  Mark Rothko, Christopher Rothko (2006). “The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art”, p.47, Yale University Press

  89 Copy quote

• 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

  Glasses, Views, Looks

  76 Copy quote

• My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes

  Mark Rothko

  Art, Breathe, Abstract

  32 Copy quote

• I don't express myself in my paintings. I express my not-self.

  Mark Rothko

  Self, Expression, Painting

  21 Copy quote

• There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.

  Mark Rothko

  Artist, Painting

  Mark Rothko, Miguel López-Remiro (2006). “Writings on Art”, p.36, Yale University Press

  26 Copy quote

• 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

  Ideas, Obstacles, Clarity

  Mark Rothko, Diane Waldman (1978). “Mark Rothko, 1903-1970: a retrospective”, Harry N. Abrams

  53 Copy quote

• The picture must be... a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.

  Mark Rothko

  Needs, Unexpected, Revelations

  Mark Rothko (1997). “Mark Rothko”, Stewart Tabori & Chang

  20 Copy quote

• This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.

  Mark Rothko

  Common Sense, Imagination, World

  Mark Rothko, Miguel López-Remiro (2006). “Writings on Art”, p.36, Yale University Press

  37 Copy quote

• The people that weep before my paintings are having the same religious experience that I had when I painted it.

  Mark Rothko

  Religious, People, Emotion

  14 Copy quote

• A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent.

  Mark Rothko

  Eye, World, Companionship

  Susan J. Barnes, John de Menil, Dominique de Menil, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman (1989). “The Rothko Chapel: An Act of Faith”, Menil Foundation

  50 Copy quote

• 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

  Mean, Reality, Artist

  Mark Rothko, Christopher Rothko (2006). “The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art”, p.21, Yale University Press

  47 Copy quote

• Small pictures since the Renaissance are like novels; large pictures are like dramas in which one participates in a direct way.

  Mark Rothko

  Drama, Renaissance, Way

  Stephanie Rosenthal, Ad Reinhardt, Haus der Kunst München, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella (2006). “Black paintings”

  15 Copy quote

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