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
pain real views
I will say without reservations that from my point of view there can be no abstractions. Any shape or area that has not the pulsating concreteness of real flesh and bones, its vulnerability to pleasure or pain is nothing at all. Any picture that does not provide the environment in which the breath of life can be drawn does not interest me.
glasses views looks
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.
allow america anyone arrange canvas classical corner critic high last love magazines music musical private saw since watch year
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.
areas danger decorative immense museum pictures relate since themselves walls
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.
american-artist intimate normal opposite painted pictures scale since
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.
american-artist archaic kinship profess
That is why we profess a spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.
american-artist close experience hang largest pictures within
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.
art doctors judging
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.
wall space trying
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.