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    MARK ROTHKO, quotes by the American artist on his painting art and life; painter in New York School

    MARK ROTHKO (1903 – 1970), his biography and artist quotes on art and painting the Sublime by the American painter in Abstract Expressionism. Rothko developed himself as an artist from surrealist art towards a purified abstract art with an intense color concentration. Famous became his series paintings in The Rothko White Chapel in Houston and in the Tate museum in England. At the bottom you find some useful links for more biography facts of Mark Rothko. – the editor.

    MARK ROTHKO
    his quotes on painting in
    American modern art
    & biography facts

    editor: Fons Heijnsbroek

    Rothko: Tryptich for Chapel in Houston, 1966

    Mark Rothko, artist quotes of the American painter on the Sublime and his colorful painting art

    – 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 (remark by Rothko he made in 1942, on the painting ‘Broadway Boogie Woogie’ of Piet Mondrian).
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes, painter of the Sublime: ‘Painters Objects’, Robert Motherwell; as quoted in ”Astract Expressionist Painting in America”, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, pp. 128-129. ( Russian-born American artist, famous for his Rothko White Chapel-paintings in Houston and the Tate museum in London; painter in Abstract Expressionism / New York School )


    – 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.
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes, painter of the Sublime: a radio broadcast, together with Adolph Gottlieb, 1943.


    – …only that subject matter is valid ( for making art) which is tragic and timeless (together with Adolph Gottlieb, fh).
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes, painter of the Sublime: a letter to the ‘New York Times’, circa 1944.


    – 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 pictorial equivalent for man’s new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes, painter of the Sublime: his statement in ‘The New York Times’, 8 July 1945.


    – It was not that the figure had been removed, not that the figures had been swept away, but the symbols for the figures 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 explains W. C. Seitz his new way of painting during the mid-1940s, fh).
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes, painter of the Sublime: ”Abstract Expressionism”, David Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd London, 1990, p. 142.


    – The aesthetic is the sine qua none for art: if a work is not easthetic, it is not art by definition… …We feel through the senses, and everyone knows that the content of art is feeling; it is the creation of an object for sensing that is the artist’s task; and it is the qualities of this object that constitute its felt content.
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes, painter of the Sublime: ‘Beyond the Aesthetics’, Robert Motherwell, in ‘Design 47’, no 8, April 1946, pp. 38-39.


    – I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing, and stretching one’s arms again transcendental experiences became possible.
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes, painter of the Sublime: fragments of his essay ‘The Romantics were prompted’ Rothko; as quoted in ‘Possibilities’, Vol. 1, no. 1, winter 1947-48, ed. by Kate Rothko Prizel and Christophor Rothko.


    – For me, Clyfford Still’s pictorial dramas are an extension of the Greek Persephone myth. As he himself has expressed it, his paintings are ‘of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated’ Every shape becomes an organic entity, inviting the multiplicity of associations inherent in all living things. To me they form a theogony of the most elementary consciousness, hardly aware of itself beyond the will to live – a profound and moving experience.
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes, painter of the Sublime: the catalogue introduction of the first one-man-show of Clyfford Still, 1946, in ‘Art of this Century’, February 12 – March 2, 1946, – the Peggy Guggenheim Papers on the work of Clyfford Still.


    – The passions are a kind of thirst, inexorable and intense, for certain feelings or felt states. To find or invent ‘objects’ (which are, more strictly speaking, relational structures) whose felt quality satisfies the passions,- that for me is the activity of the artist, an activity which does not cease even in sleep. No wonder the artist is constantly placing and displacing, relating and rupturing relations; his task is to find a complex of qualities whose feeling is just right – veering toward the unknown and chaos, yet ordered and related in order to be apprehended.
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes painter of the Sublime: ‘Beyond the Aesthetics’, Robert Motherwell, in ‘Design 47, no 8, April 1946, pp. 38-39.


    – The activity of the artist makes him less socially conditioned and more humans. It is then that he is disposed to revolution. Society stands against anarchy; the artist stands for the human against society; society therefore threats him As an anarchist. Society’s logic is faulty, but its intimation of an enemy is not. Still, the social conflict with society is an incidental obstacle in the artist’s path.
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes painter of the Sublime: ‘Beyond the Aesthetics’, Robert Motherwell, in ‘Design 47, no 8, April 1946, pp. 38-39.


    – It is Cézanne’s feeling that determined the form of his pictorial structure. It is his pictorial structure that gives off his feeling. If all his pictorial structures were to disappear from the world, so would a certain feeling….
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes painter of the Sublime: ‘Beyond the Aesthetics’, Robert Motherwell, in ‘Design 47, no 8, April 1946, pp. 38-39.


    – Feeling must have a medium in order to function at all; in the same way, thought must have symbols. It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being, just as do responses tot the objects of the external world… …The medium of painting is such changing and ordering on an ideal plane, ideal in that the medium is more tractable, subtle, and capable of emphasis (abstraction is a kind of emphasis) than everyday life.
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes painter of the Sublime: ‘Beyond the Aesthetics’, Robert Motherwell, in ‘Design 47, no 8, April 1946, pp. 38-39. . ( Russian-born American artist, famous for his Rotko White Chapel paintings in Houston and the Tate in London; Abstract Expressionism / New York School )


    – Drama moves us: conflict is an inherent pattern in reality. Harmony moves us too: faced as we are with ever imminent disorder. It is a powerful idea. Van Gogh’s drama and Seurat’s silent harmony were born in the same country and epoch: but they do not contradict one another; they refer to different patterns among those which constitute reality.
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes painter of the Sublime: ‘Beyond the Aesthetics’, Robert Motherwell, in ‘Design 47, no 8, April 1946, pp. 38-39.


    – But the most common error among the whole-hearted abstractionists nowadays (1946, fh) is to mistake the medium for an end in itself, instead of a means. On the other hand, the surrealists erred in supposing that one can do without a medium, that in attacking the medium one does not destroy just one means for getting into the unknown. Color and space relations constitute such a means because from them can be made structures which exhibit the various patterns of reality.
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes painter of the Sublime: ‘Beyond the Aesthetics’, Robert Motherwell, in ‘Design 47, no 8, April 1946, pp. 38-39.


    -Like the Cubists before them, the abstractionists felt a beautiful thing in perceiving how the medium can, of its own accord, carry one into the unknown, that is to the discovery of new structures. What an inspiration the medium is….
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes painter of the Sublime: ‘Beyond the Aesthetics’, Robert Motherwell, in ‘Design 47, no 8, April 1946, pp. 38-39.


    – Like Rimbaud before them, the surrealists abandoned the aesthetic altogether; it takes a certain courage to leave poetry for Africa (as Rimbaud did, fh). They revealed their insight as essentially moral in never forgetting for a moment that most living is a process of conforming to an established order which is inhuman in its drives and consequences. Their hatred sustained them through all the humiliating situations in which the modern artist find himself, and led them to conceptions beyond the reach of more passive souls. For them true ‘poetry’ was freedom from mechanical social responses. No wonder they loved the work of children and the insane – if not the creatures themselves.
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes painter of the Sublime: ‘Beyond the Aesthetics’, Robert Motherwell, in ‘Design 47, no 8, April 1946, pp. 38-39.


    – …one must agree with Rilke (German poet, fh) when he says that with ‘nothing can one touch a work of art so little as with critical words…’ It was Marcel Duchamp who was critical, when he drew a moustache on the ‘Mona Lisa’. And so was Mondrian when he dreamt of the dissolution of painting, sculpture, and architecture in to a transcendent ensemble.
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes painter of the Sublime: ‘Beyond the Aesthetics’, Robert Motherwell, in ‘Design 47, no 8, April 1946, pp. 38-39.


    – The progression of a painter’s work, as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity: toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer. As examples of such obstacles, I give (among others) memory, history or geometry, which are swamps of generalization from which one might pull out parodies of ideas (which are ghosts) but never an idea in itself. To achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood.
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes painter of the Sublime: ‘Tiger’s Eye’, Vol. 1, no 9, October 1949; as quoted in ”Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics”, ed. by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 170.


    – I paint very large pictures. I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason paint them however, – I think it applies to other painters I know -, is precisely because I want to be very 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, source of artist quotes painter of the Sublime: ‘Interiors’, Vol. 110, no 10, May 1951; as quoted in ”Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics”, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 172.


    – ..a painting is not a picture of an experience, it is an experience (1959, fh) .
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes painter of the Sublime: ”Abstract Expressionism”, Davind Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd London, 1990, p. 22 ( Russian-born American artist, famous for his Rothko White Chapel paintings in Houston and the Tate in London; Abstract Expressionism / New York School ).


    – It would be good if little place could be set up all over the country, like a little chapel where the traveller, or wanderer, could come for an hour to meditate on a single painting hung in a small room, and by itself.
    * from the interview with Ethel Schwabacher, May 30, 1954; as quoted in ‘Morandi 1894 – 1964’, published by Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, ed: M. C. Bandera & R. Miracco – 2008; p. 330


    – …it was with the utmost reluctance that I found the figure could not serve my purposes.. ..But a time came when none of us could use the figure without mutilating it (Rothko’s quote in 1959, looking back to the 1930’s, fh) .
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes painter of the Sublime: ”Abstract Expressionism”, Davind Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd London, 1990, p. 143.


    – (I am) dealing not with the particular anecdote, but rather with the Spirit of Myth, which is generic to all myths at all times.
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes on the Sublime: ”Abstract Expressionism”, David Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd London, 1990, p. 81.


    – The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental.
    The unfriendliness of society to his activity is difficult for the artists to accept. Yet this very hostility can act as a lever for true liberation… …Both the sense of community and of security depends on the familiar. Free of them, transcendental experiences become possible.
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes painter of the Sublime: ”Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics”, ed. by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 167.


    – I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers. They have been created from the need for a group of actors who are able to move dramatically without embarrassment and execute gestures without shame. Neither the action nor the actors can be anticipated, or described in advance. They begin a an unknown adventure in an unknown space… …Ideas and plans that existed in the mind at the start were simply the doorway through which one left the world in which they occur. The great cubist pictures thus transcend and belie the implications of the cubist program.
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes painter of the Sublime: ”Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics”, ed. by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, Creators pp. 167-168.


    – The most important tool the artist fashions through constant practice is the faith in his ability to produce miracles when they are needed. Pictures must be miraculous; the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended. He is an outsider. The picture must be for him, as for anyone experiencing it later, a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes painter of the Sublime: ”Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics”, ed. by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 168.


    – On shapes:
    They are unique elements in a unique situation.
    They are organisms with volition and a passion for self-assertion.
    They move with internal freedom, and without need to conform with or to violate what is probable in the familiar world.
    They have no direct association with any particular visible experience, but in them one recognizes the principle and passion of organisms.
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes painter of the Sublime: ”Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics”, ed. by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 168. . ( Russian-born American artist, famous for his Rothko White Chapel paintings in Houston and the Tate in London; painter in Abstract Expressionism / New York School )


    – 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.
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes painter of the Sublime: ”Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics”, ed. by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, Creators p. 168.


    – 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.
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes painter of the Sublime: his letter to Clyfford Still, undated; as quoted in ”Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics”, ed. by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 170./p>


    – I use colors that have already been experienced through the light of day and through the state of mind of the total man. In other words, my colors are not colors that are laboratory tools which are isolated from all accidentals or impurities so that they have a specified identity or purity.
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes painter of the Sublime: ‘Working notes’, undated; as quoted in as quoted in ”Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics”, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 173.


    – 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).
    * Mark Rothko, source of artist quotes painter of the Sublime: ”Astract Expressionist Painting in America”, W.C. Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 116.


    Mark Rothko, art links for more biography facts and on his painting art & technique

    * biogaphy facts about the life and expressive abstract art of American artist Mark Rothko, on Wikipedia

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    * info about life and art of the American artist Rothko and his way of creating; including images of his paintings, on the National Gallery website