71 Quotes by Mark Rothko

From him I got my love for music, and for many years I was the classical music critic for magazines that have since folded, such as Musical America and High Fidelity. During the last year of his life, I would come to the studio, and he would arrange a corner for me with a canvas and paints. I don't think that I saw him paint. He didn't allow anyone to watch him. That was his own private affair.

I also hang the largest pictures so that they must be first encountered at close quarters, so that the first experience is to be within the picture.

I have on occasion successfully dealt with this problem by tending to crowd the show rather than making it spare.

While the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done.

Small pictures since the Renaissance are like novels; large pictures are like dramas in which one participates in a direct way.

The abstract artist has given material existence to many unseen worlds and tempi.

The people that weep before my paintings are having the same religious experience that I had when I painted it.

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.

The picture must be... a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.