Mark Rothko quotes

Born
September 25, 1903, Daugavpils, Latvia.

Died
February 25, 1970.

Occupation
Painter.

Mark Rothko was an American painter.

There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.
– Mark Rothko

Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama.
– Mark Rothko

Silence is so accurate.
– Mark Rothko

A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.
– Mark Rothko

There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend: One day, the black will swallow the red.
– Mark Rothko

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

I am here to make you think. . . . I am not here to make pretty pictures!
– Mark Rothko

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

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.
– Mark Rothko

I’m not an abstractionist… I’m not interested in relationships of colour or form or anything else.
– Mark Rothko

There is more power in telling little than in telling all.
– Mark Rothko

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

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.
– Mark Rothko

Look, it’s my misery that I have to paint this kind of painting, it’s your misery that you have to love it, and the price of the misery is thirteen hundred and fifty dollars.
– Mark Rothko

It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one’s arms again.
– Mark Rothko