There is a train track in the history of art that goes way back to Mesopotamia. It skips the whole Orient, The Mayas, And American Indians. Duchamp i… - Willem de Kooning
" "There is a train track in the history of art that goes way back to Mesopotamia. It skips the whole Orient, The Mayas, And American Indians. Duchamp is on it. Cézanne is on it. Picasso and the Cubists are on it; Giacometti, Piet Mondrian, and so many.. .I have some feeling about all these people – millions of them – on this enormous track, a way into history. They had a peculiar way of measuring. They seemed to measure with a length similar to their own height.. .The idea that the thing that the artist is making can come to know for itself, how high it is, how wide and how deep it is, is a historical one, - a traditional one I think. It comes from man's own image.
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About Willem de Kooning
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. Initially, he was strongly influenced by Picasso, Cubism, and Chaim Soutine. He was married with Elaine de Kooning and closely befriended with Arshile Gorky; later with Franz Kline.
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Alternative Names:
Willem De Kooning
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Willem DeKooning
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William de Kooning
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Willem Dekooning
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willem de kooning
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W. de Kooning
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Additional quotes by Willem de Kooning
..the word 'abstract' comes from the light tower of the philosophers.. ..one of their spotlights that they have particularly focused on 'Art'.. ..(abstraction was) not so much what you could paint but rather what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that subject matter came into existence as something you ought not have.
When, about fifteen years ago, I walked into Arshile's studio for the first time, the atmosphere was so beautiful that I got a little dizzy and when I came to, I was bright enough to take the hint immediately. If the bookkeepers think it necessary to make sure of where things and people came from, well then, I came from 36 Union Square [address of the studio of Gorky that time].. .I am glad that it is about impossible to get away from his powerful influence.
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I make a little mystique for myself. Since I have no preference or so-called sense of color, I could take almost everything that could be some accident of a previous painting. Or I set out to make a series. I take, for instance, some pictures where I take a color, some arbitrary color I took from some place. Well, this is gray maybe, and I mix the color for that, and then I find out that when I am through with getting the color the way I want it, I have six other colors in it, to get that color; and then I take those six colors and I use them also with this color. It is probably like a composer does a variation on a certain theme. But it isn't technical, it isn't just fun.
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