71 Quotes by Mark Rothko

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.

Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.

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.

We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.

That is why we profess a spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.

There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.

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.

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.

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.