11 Quotes & Sayings By Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko was born into a Jewish family in Russia. His parents were both artists, and his mother encouraged his early interest in painting. After attending the Stroganov School of Art in St. Petersburg, he moved to Paris in 1922 to study at the Académie Julian Read more

He became a French citizen in 1927, and by 1932 had begun to make his mark on the art scene with startlingly abstract works. But it was not until 1938 that he won international acclaim with paintings such as "No. 14", which has become one of the most important works of twentieth-century art.

In 1948 Rothko died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 47, just before his last major exhibition opened at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

1
It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again. Mark Rothko
2
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
3
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
4
I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene, whether in friendship or mere observation, that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface. Mark Rothko
5
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
6
You’ve got sadness in you, I’ve got sadness in me — and my works of art are places where the two sadnesses can meet, and therefore both of us need to feel less sad. Mark Rothko
7
It is really one of the most serious faults which can be found with the whole conception of democracy, that its cultural function must move on the basis of the common denominator. Such a point of view indeed would make a mess of all of the values which we have developed for examining works of art. It would address one end of education in that it would consider that culture which was available to everyone, but in that achievement it would eliminate culture itself. This is surely the death of all thought. This quote is taken from "The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art" by Mark Rothko, written 1940-1 and published posthumously in 2004 by Yale University Press, pp.126-7. Mark Rothko
8
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
9
A picture lives by companionship. 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. Mark Rothko
10
Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness. Mark Rothko