Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970)
Born Marcus Rothkowitz, was a Latvian-born American painter sometimes classified as an Abstract Expressionist.
I paint very large pictures because I want to create a state of intimacy. A large picture is an immediate transaction. It takes you into it.
It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.
We favor the simple expression of complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.
This world of imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.
To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.
There is a moment of blinding light. There is a moment that seems like death, a paralysis. Then a new man, Paul, emerges from the experience. Rothko, the most famous example, changed his name, his wife and his style in a few months of profound self-questioning.
Mark Rothko was very conscious of his sources, both as location and as cultural heritage.
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)
With us the disguise must be complete. The familiar identity of things has to be pulverized in order to destroy the finite associations with which our society increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our environment.
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 academism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.
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, fh)
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 painting 'Broadway Boogie Woogie' of Piet Mondrian)
To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risk.
We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.
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.
We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.
I quarrel with surrealists and abstract art only as one quarrels with his father and mother.
(I am) dealing not with the particular anecdote, but rather with the Spirit of Myth, which is generic to all myths at all times.
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 pictoral equivalent for man’s new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.
I am not an abstractionist. ... I am not interested in the relationships of color or form or anything else. ... I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on — and the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures show that I communicate those basic human emotions. ... The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!