Tim Marlow TV - Andrew Graham-Dixon TV - Simon Schama TV - Arne Glimcher - Mark Rothko - Matthew Collings TV - Waldemar Januszczak TV -
Mark Rothko, whose wonderful abstract Untitled 1950-2 work hangs there owes a debt to Monet. Tim Marlow on ... The New Tate Modern
The jewel in the crown ... Seagram Murals 1958-59; they are one of the great achievements of twentieth century art ... Works that pulsate with life ... Words can never do them justice. ibid.
The feat of selling out also preyed on the mind of Pollock’s friend and contemporary Mark Rothko. In 1958 he was offered a lucrative commission in Manhattan’s most talked about new skyscraper ... the Four Seasons Restaurant. Andrew Graham-Dixon, Art of America 2/3, BBC 2011
They are made of pure colour laid in translucent layers and fields. ibid.
Once you’ve got Rothko on your mind you can find his spirit or at least find yourself seeing with his abstract eyes almost everywhere you go. ibid.
The Rothko Chapel ... What kind of religious space is hard to say ... It’s almost like a hall of mirrors. ibid.
Just how powerful is Art? ... Can it change the world? Simon Schama’s Power of Art: Rothko, BBC 2006
On February 25th 1970 nine paintings by the American artist Mark Rothko arrived at London’s Tate Gallery. A few hours earlier on the same, Rothko’s body was found lying on the bathroom floor. ibid.
Rothko said his paintings begin an unknown adventure into an unknown space. ibid.
When in 1958 the Canadian company Seagram wanted a painter to decorate their New York headquarters there was only one preferable choice – Mark Rothko ... He was the greatest living American painter. ibid.
What could Art do? Could it cut through the white noise of daily life, connect us to the basic emotions that make us human? ibid.
He [Rothko] was ambivalent, not just about the commission but about American capitalism, about his own American success story. ibid.
Rothko had come to New York in 1923 to wander around, bum about, and starve a bit, he later said. He enrolled in an art class. ibid.
The whole problem of Art, he said, is to establish human values here in this specific civilisation. ibid.
Rothko had always wanted to give his paintings the emotion force of the old masters. ibid.
His paintings would never hang in the Four Seasons [restaurant]. ibid.
Shadowed by melancholy, his art got darker and more intense, just as modern art was going Pop. ibid.
If some of those portals are blocked, others are opened into that unknown space that Rothko talked out, the only place Art can take us. Far away from the buzzing static of the moment, and towards the music of the spheres. Everything Rothko did to these paintings – the column-like forms suggested rather than drawn ... To make the surface ambiguous, porous. ibid.
Can Art be ever more complete and powerful? I don’t think so. ibid.
What Rothko is really interested in is the idea of an almost formlessness use of colour to transmit pure human emotion. You just have to strip away all of the prejudices that you have looking at a painting by Rothko, and let it flow over you like great music flows over you. There are very few artists in the history of art that create something that we have never seen before. And Rothko is one of those artists. Arne Glimcher, Pace Gallery
There is no such things as good painting about nothing. 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
That is why we profess a spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art. Mark Rothko
We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. Mark Rothko
I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of colour or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. Mark Rothko
When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing. No galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet, it was a golden age, for we all had nothing to lose and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity, consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large I shall not venture to discuss. But I do know, that many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow. We must all hope we find them. Mark Rothko
The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental. Mark Rothko
To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risk. Mark Rothko, joint statement with Adolph Gottlieb often referred to as manifesto
We favor the simple expression of complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth. ibid.
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. ibid.
I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing, and stretching one’s arms again transcendental experiences became possible. Mark Rothko, essay The Romantics Were Prompted
I paint very large pictures. I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them however – I think it applies to other painters I know – is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command. Mark Rothko, Interiors vol 110 May 1951
The tragic notion of the image is always present in my mind. I can’t point it out. There are no skull and bones. Mark Rothko, 1958 lecture
One does not paint for design students or historians but for human beings. And the reaction in human terms is the only thing that is really satisfactory to the artist. ibid.
Rothko was appalled by a lot of modern art. The way it was going … And we’ve given him the job of being our tragic artist of nothingness. Matthew Collings, What is Modern Art? IV: Nothing Matters, Channel 4 1999
The Rothko Chapel: His paintings here are the grandest, darkest, blackest, most unfathomable ones he ever made. Bloody hell, they’re black. ibid.
A Mark Rothko painting is all looming void. The edges fuzzy, incredibly rich vibration of colour. But it’s not just loveliness; there’s a sombre, dim, awful atmosphere of portentous happening. Like you’re being dragged back to something ancient, profound. Matthew Collings, This is Civilisation IV: Uncertainty, BBC 2007
Rothko committed suicide ... The meaning of the paintings is different. Matthew Collings, The Rules of Abstraction, BBC 2014
This is the Rothko chapel in Texas … Rothko like Gorky before him committed suicide. Waldemar Januszczak, Big Sky, Big Dreams, Big Art: Made in the USA s1e2, BBC 2018