Willem de Kooning Quotes

The pictures [De Kooning had] done since the 'Women', they're emotions, most of them. Most of them are landscapes and highways and sensations of that, outside the city – with the feeling of going to the city or coming from it. I am not a pastoral character. I'm not a – how do you say that? – 'country dumpling'. I am here and I like New York City. But I love to go out in a car.. .I'm just crazy about going over the roads and highways.

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.

No, the artists are in a state of belated Age of Reason. They want to get hold of things, like Mondrian. He was a fantastic artist, but now when we read his ideas and his idea of Neo-Plasticism [= De Stijl ] – pure plasticity – it’s kind of silly, I think. I mean, not for him, but I think one could spend one's life having this desire to be in and outside at the same time. He could see a future life and a future city – not like me, who am absolutely not interested in seeing the future city. I'm perfectly happy to be alive now.

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..

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 aesthetics of painting were always in a state of development parallel to the development of painting itself. They influenced each other and vice versa. But all of the sudden, in that famous turn of the century a few people thought they could take the bull by the horns and invent an aesthetic beforehand. After immediately disagreeing with each other, they began to form all kinds of groups, each with the idea of freeing art.. .The question as they saw it, was not so much what you could paint, but what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that the subject matter came into existence as something you ought not to have.

The 'Women' [paintings] had to do with the female painted through all ages, all those idols, and maybe I was stuck to a certain extent; I couldn't go on. It did one thing for me: it eliminated composition, arrangement, relationships, light – all this silly talk about line, colour and form – because that was the thing I wanted to get hold of.

Personally, I do not need a movement. What was given to me, I take for granted. Of all movements, I like Cubism most. It had that wonderful unsure atmosphere of reflection - a poetic frame where something could be possible, where an artist could practise [sic] his intuition. It didn't want to get rid of what went before. Instead it added something to it. The parts that I can appreciate in other [art] movements came out of Cubism. Cubism became a movement, it didn't set out to be one. It has force in it, but it was no 'force-movement.' 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.

There is a time when you just take a walk.. ..you walk in your own landscape.. .It has an innocence that is kind of a grand feeling.. .Somehow I have the feeling that old man Monet might have felt like that, just simple in front of things, or old man Cézanne too.. .I really understand them now.