About Mark Rothko: Mark Rothko is generally identified as an Abstract Expressionist. With Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, he is one of the most famous postwar American artists.
That is why we profess a spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.
Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.
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...
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 academicism.
We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.
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.
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.
I also hang the pictures low rather than high, and particularly in the case of the largest ones, often as close to the floor as is feasible, for that is the way they are painted.
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.
It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again.
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.
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 cruel...
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 whi...
There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.
