Willem de Kooning

"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 potato seems like a Romantic (organic) object.. ..you can watch it growing if you don’t eat it. It is going to change – grow, rot, disappear. A pebble is like a Classical thing – it changes little if any.. .If it was big you could keep the dead down with it.. ..The Classical idea is not around much anymore. [Der Koning is comparing the Potatoes of Vincent Van Gogh to the Pebbles of Jean Arp."

"But one day, some painter used Abstraction as a title for one of his paintings. It was a still life. And it was a very tricky title. And it wasn’t really a very good one. From then on the idea became something extra. Immediately it gave some people the idea that they could free art from itself. Until then, Art meant everything that was in it – not what you could take off it. There was only one thing you could take out of it sometime when you were in the right mood – that abstract and indefinable sensation, the aesthetic part – and still leave it were it was..."

"You know the real world, this so-called real world, is just something you put up with. Like everybody else. Im in my element when I am a little bit out of this world. Then Im in the real world – Im on the beam. Because when Im falling, Im doing all right. When Im slipping, I say: he, this is interesting. Its when Im standing upright that bothers me."

"I feel sometimes an American artist must feel, like a baseball player or something - a member of a team writing American history.."

"Mans 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."

"I had my own eyes, but I wasnt 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 elses fingers there."

"..Im sure that Pollocks ambiance affected me tremendously. I was much more drawn to Pollocks painting on the raw canvas [and on the floor!] than I was to de Koonings easel cuisine and there its a matter of sensibility. Aesthetically, socially, in every way the de Kooning thing seemed to be much more productive, planned, admirable at the time. But I didnt think so. I thought that Pollock was really the one living in nature much more than Bill [= Willem de Kooning]."

"So it is appropriate that de Koonings pictures of the 1960s are drained of the anguish and look of despair which so profoundly marked his earlier work. In the new In the new women [Women paintings], the mood is Joy."

"I admit I know little of Orient art. But that is because I cannot find in it what I am looking for, or what I am talking about. To me the Oriental idea of beauty is that it isn’t there. It is in a state of nor being there. It is absent. That is why it is so good. It is the same thing I dont like in Suprematism, Purism and non-objectivity... I do like the idea that they - the pots and pans [pictured in the classic still life paintings], I mean – are always in relation to man. They have no soul of their own, like they seem to have in the Orient.."

"Jackson has broken the ice for us."

"The texture of experience is prior to everything else."