MARK ROTHKO

WRITINGS selection IMPLICIT in my WORK

 

 

 

It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in the concrete form of their notions of reality.

Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them.

The artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art

 


 

Art is for me an anecdote of the spirit

“Personal declaration” 1945

 


No possible set of notes can explain our paintings. The explanation must come out of a consummated experience between picture and onlooker. The appreciation of art is a true marriage of minds. And in art as in marriage, lack of communication is ground of annulment.

Rothko and Gottlieb letter’s to the editor, 1943

The word portrait cannot possible to have the same meaning for us that it had for past generations (…)

There is however a profound reason for the persistence of the word “portrait” because the real essence of the great portraiture of all time is the artist’s eternal interest of the human figure, character and emotions -in short in the human drama. That Rembrandt expressed it by posing a sitter is irrelevant. We do not know the sitter, but we are intensely aware of the drama.

The Archaic Greeks, on the other hand, used as their models the inner visions which they had of their gods. And in our day, our visions are the fulfilment of our own needs. It must be noted that the great painters of the figure had this in common. Their portraits resemble each other far more than their recall the peculiarities of a particular model. In sense, they have painted one character in all their work. This is equally true of Rembrandt, the Greeks, or Modigliani (…)

What is indicated here is that the artist’s real model is an ideal which embraces all of the human drama rather than the appearance of a particular individual.

“The portrait of the modern artist”. By Rothko and Adolf Gottlieb, 1943

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