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Willem de Kooning Quotes
1904–1997 Netherlands
Willem de Kooning (24 April 1904 – 19 March 1997) was an abstract expressionist painter, born in Rotterdam, Netherlands, who settled in the United States. Along with Jackson Pollock, and others, he was an exponent of Abstract expressionism.
Also known as: Willem De Kooning
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13 quotes
The texture of experience is prior to everything else.
I feel sometimes an American artist must feel, like a baseball player or something - a member of a team writing American history..
Willem de Kooning (1969)
For really, when you think of all the life and death problems in the art of the Renaissance, who cares if a Chevalier is laughing or that a young girl has a red blouse on.
The Renaissance and Order (1950)
Jackson has broken the ice for us.
It is disastrous to name ourselves.
And then there is that one-man movement, Marcel Duchamp — for me a truly modern movement because it implies that each artist can do what he thinks he ought to — a movement for each person and open for everybody.
A Brief History of American Culture (1996)
Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity. I do not think.. ..of art as a situation of comfort.
I am always in the picture somewhere. The amount of space I use I am always in, I seem to move around in it. And there seems to be a time when I lose sight of what I wanted to do, and then I am out of it. If the picture has a countenance I keep it. If it hasn't, I throw it away.
I had my own eyes, but I wasn't always looking in the right direction. I was certainly in need of a helping hand at times. Now I feel like Manet who said, "Yes, I am influenced by everybody. But every time I put my hands in my pockets I find someone else's fingers there."
The point they (Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Tatlin, Gabo, the neo-Plasticists, and so on) all had in common was to be inside and outside at the same time.. .For me, to be inside and outside is to be in an unheated studio with broken windows in the winter, or taking a nap on somebody's porch in the summer.
The sentiment of the Futurists was simpler. No space. Everything ought to keep going! That's probably the reason they went themselves. Either a man was a machine or else a sacrifice to make machines with..
What Abstract Art means to me (1951)
Nature then, is just nature. I admit I am very impressed with it. The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can do for is to put some order in ourselves. When a man ploughs his field at the right time, it means just that.
Man's own form in space – his body – was a private prison; and that it was because of this imprisoning misery – because he was hungry and overworked and went to a horrid place called home late at night in the rain, and his bones ached and his head was heavy.
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