Thread by @dean_frey

Remembering Mark Rothko on his birthday 🎂
📷 Bert Stern for Life Magazine, 1959
"I'm the most violent of all the American painters. Behind those colors there hides the final cataclysm."

Mark Rothko by Consuelo Kanaga, 1940s
@brooklynmuseum
"The most important tool the artist fashions through constant practice is the faith in his ability to produce miracles when they are needed."

Another portrait of Mark Rothko by Consuelo Kanaga
Yorktown Heights, ca. 1949
@brooklynmuseum
"He loved Mozart. And he was a great, loyal, wonderfully affectionate friend."
- Stanley Kunitz

Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell & Bradley Walker Tomlin in the John D. Rockerfeller 3rd Guest House, 1951
The paintings:
Rothko's Number 18, 1948
Motherwell's The Voyage, 1949
Tomlin's Number 9: In Praise of Gertrude Stein, 1950

"In the two soft-edged and rounded rectangles of Mark Rothko’s matured style there is an enveloping magic, which conveys ... a sense of being in the midst of greatness. It is the color of course."
- Duncan Phillips
@PhillipsMuseum
Ochre and Red on Red, 1954

"Dear Lee: I wish I could find some way to tell you how I feel about Jackson."
- Mark Rothko's letter to Lee Krasner, August 16, 1956, five days after Jackson Pollock's death.
@smithsonian
@ArchivesAmerArt

The rest of Mark Rothko's letter to Lee Krasner.
"I wish I had been there, too, for my own sake."

"There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth."
When Irving Sandler encountered this quote from Nietzsche, he mailed it to Mark Rothko.
📷 Timothy A. Clary, New York, 2020

Mark Rothko at the Sidney Janis Gallery
📷 Fred W. McDarrah, 1961
"His painting accumulated resonance by appealing to myth; but myths were in decline..."
- Robert Hughes

The photographer Hans Namuth's point of view often underlines psychological insights. His shot of Mark Rothko, from 1964, is in retrospect very sad. As the painter himself said, 'There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend: one day, the black will swallow the red.'

Mark Rothko by Hans Namuth, 1964
Today we're celebrating the great artist's birthday. 🎂
@smithsonian
@ArchivesAmerArt

Looking at Mark Rothko's No. 5/No. 22, 1950
📷 Thomas Hoepker, @MuseumModernArt, 2005

Mark Rothko by Kay Bell Reynal, 1952
@smithsonian
@ArchivesAmerArt
Dorothy Seiberling quoted Rothko in a 1959 Life magazine feature:
"A painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience."

Mark Rothko by Kate Rothko, 1961
"However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command."
A wonderful portrait! Kate was only 10 or 11 when she took this.

Mark Rothko, "How to Combine Architecture, Painting, and Sculpture", 1951 symposium
@MuseumModernArt

A remembrance of Mark Rothko, an excerpt from a blog post @royalacademy by Paul Huxley RA
royalacademy.org.uk/article/abstra…

Here's Mark Rothko talking about his contemporaries in a letter to Barney & Annalee (Barnett Newman & his wife), 1946.
Bob is Robert Motherwell.
More of a social whirl than lone artists in their garrets!
Such is the panorama.

Mark Rothko by Ben Martin
"No other painter can occasion feelings so intense, so directly."
- Peter Schjeldahl

Kate Rothko Prizel in front of her father's No. 36 (Black Stripe)
Munich Rothko Retrospective 2008
📷 Johannes Simon

Mark Rothko by Rudy Burkhardt, 1960
"Mark said many times he felt that tragedy was the only theme noble enough for art."
- Arne Glimcher