Mark Rothko: Quotes about the world

“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: 1940's, Beyond the Aesthetics (1946), pp. 38-39

World , Feeling

“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: after 1970, posthumous, Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics', 1990, pp. 167-168

World , Idea , Thinking

“Since I have a deep sense of responsibility for the life my pictures will lead out in the world, I will with gratitude accept any form of their exposition in which their life and meaning can be maintained, and avoid all occasions where I think that this cannot be done.... unfortunately, there are few existing alternatives for the kind of activity which your museum represents. Nevertheless, in my own life at least, there must be some congruity between convictions and actions if I am to continue to function and work.”

Mark Rothko

Quote from Rothko's letter to Whitney's director Lloyd Goodrich, End of 1952; as cited in Mark Rothko, a biography, James E. B. Breslin, University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 304
Rothko was turning down a museum purchase
1950's

Life , World , Thinking , Sense

“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: 1940's, Beyond the Aesthetics (1946), pp. 38-39

Life , World , Art , Way

“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

common statement in 'The New York Times', 8 July 1945
1940's

World , Knowledge , Time

“It's a risky business to send a picture out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent who could extend their affliction universally!”

Mark Rothko

As quoted in Conversations with Artists (1957) by Selden Rodman, p. 92; later published in 'Notes from a conversation with Selden Rodman, 1956' in Writings on Art : Mark Rothko (2006) ed. Miguel López-Remiro ISBN 0300114400
1950's

World , Business , Affliction , Universe

“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.”

Mark Rothko

1942, on the late painting 'Broadway Boogie Woogie' of Piet Mondrian
Quote of Rothko, in Painters Objects, Robert Motherwell, pp. 95, 96; as cited in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, pp. 128-129
1940's

Life , World , Music , Light