“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

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Mark Rothko 36

American painter 1903–1970

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