Creativity Quote by Mark Rothko

Rothko is defending a move that can look, from the outside, like name-dropping: Olympus as a prestige filter for modern painting. He flips that suspicion into a practical argument. Myths aren’t decorative references or cultured winks; they’re the oldest shorthand we have for inner weather. When language starts to fail at describing fear, desire, dread, ecstasy, the human mind reaches for stories that already mapped those terrains. Calling them “eternal symbols” isn’t a claim about timeless beauty so much as a claim about repeatable psychic structure: people change costumes; the nervous system doesn’t.

The phrasing is pointedly unromantic. “Fall back” suggests necessity, even exhaustion, not admiration. Rothko is admitting that modernity’s promise of total novelty has limits. If the project is “basic psychological ideas,” the artist isn’t inventing new emotions; he’s building new conditions for feeling the old ones with full force. That’s the subtext of his early myth-titled works and the bridge to his later, untitled color fields: the myth is a scaffold, not the destination. Once the painting can generate the experience directly - tragedy without characters, awe without narrative - the reference can drop away.

Context matters: mid-century abstraction was often accused of being either empty formalism or private mysticism. Rothko answers by rooting his ambition in shared cultural memory, arguing that abstraction can be intelligible without being literal, and profound without being explained. He’s not retreating into antiquity; he’s raiding it for emotional architecture.