Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko, born Markus Yakovlevich Rotkovich, was an American painter of Russian Jewish descent. Although Rothko himself refused to adhere to any art movement, he is generally identified as an abstract expressionist. With Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, he is one of the most famous postwar American artists...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth25 September 1903
CountryUnited States of America
order identity association
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.
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From him I got my love for music, and for many years I was the classical music critic for magazines that have since folded, such as Musical America and High Fidelity. During the last year of his life, I would come to the studio, and he would arrange a corner for me with a canvas and paints. I don't think that I saw him paint. He didn't allow anyone to watch him. That was his own private affair.
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Since my pictures are large, colorful, and unframed, and since museum walls are usually immense and formidable, there is the danger that the pictures relate themselves as decorative areas to the walls.
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This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative; and have been painted in a scale of normal living rather than an institutional scale.
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That is why we profess a spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.
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I also hang the largest pictures so that they must be first encountered at close quarters, so that the first experience is to be within the picture.
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While the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done.
matter timeless tragic
We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.
artist painting
There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.
breathing silence solitude
It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again.
drama way renaissance
Small pictures since the Renaissance are like novels; large pictures are like dramas in which one participates in a direct way.
artist world unseen
The abstract artist has given material existence to many unseen worlds and tempi.
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And last, it may be worthwhile trying to hang something beyond the partial wall because some of the pictures do very well in a confined space.
religious people emotion
The people that weep before my paintings are having the same religious experience that I had when I painted it.