Creativity Quote by Mark Rothko

“Spiritual kinship” is Rothko’s polite way of dodging the museum label that follows him everywhere: decorator of upscale living rooms. He’s staking a claim that his canvases aren’t puzzles to be solved or styles to be dated, but instruments meant to work on you the way ritual objects do. The word “profess” matters. It’s public, almost doctrinal, implying a community of believers (artists, viewers, modernists) bound by something older than taste.

The phrase “primitive and archaic art” carries the period’s baggage - a modernist shorthand that romanticizes non-Western and ancient forms as closer to “pure” feeling. Rothko taps that myth for leverage, not because he’s nostalgic for caves and totems, but because he wants permission to bypass narrative, perspective, and polite subject matter. If modern life is overlit by advertising, politics, and chatter, archaic art becomes his alibi for silence: a lineage of images designed to hold grief, awe, dread, transcendence without explanation.

Context sharpens the intent. Mid-century abstraction had to justify itself against critics asking, What is this supposed to be? Rothko answers: it’s supposed to be an encounter. By aligning his work with the archaic, he recasts the gallery as a quasi-temple and the viewer as a participant, not a consumer. The subtext is combative: if you’re looking for cleverness, you’ve already missed it; the point is to feel something uncomfortably big, in the oldest register we have.