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It is disastrous to name ourselves.

— Willem de Kooning

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Notes from Wikiquote

short answer of Willem de Kooning in a panel discussion in 1950 when the former director of the New York museum of modern Art, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. demanded: We should have a name for which we can blame the artists – for once in history!

More quotes by Willem de Kooning

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.

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)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Willem de Kooning (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.