Carolina QuotesFor 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.
Willem de Kooning Connected to the Carolinas
Source
The Renaissance and Order (1950) Trans/formation, vol. 1, no.2, 1951, pp. 85-87.
- year
- 1950
- locator
- pp. 85-87
Cite this record
“For really, when you think of all the life and death problem…” Willem de Kooning. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-0C6387F547. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/0c6387f547
More from Willem de Kooning
Certain artists and critics attacked me for painting the 'Women' [series of paintings, De kooning started in 1950], but I felt that this was their problem, not mine. I don’t really feel like a non-objective painter at all.. .It's really absurd to make an image, like a human image. With paint, today, when you think about it, since we have this problem of doing it or not doing it. But then all of a sudden it was even more absurd not to do it. So I fear I have to follow my desires.
Kandinsky understood 'form' as a form, like an object in the real world; and a object, he said, was a narrative – and so, of course, he disapproved of it. He wanted ‘his music without words’. He wanted to be 'simple as a child'. He intended, with his 'inner-self' to rid himself of 'philosophical barricades' (he sat down and wrote something about all this). But in turn his own writing has become a philosophical barricade, even it is a barricade full of holes. It offers a kind of Middle European idea of Buddhism or, anyhow, something too theosophical for me.
What fascinates me about Van Gogh is that his sun dries up everything. Maybe he was melodramatic but my point really is.. ..if you are a painter you have to face that self-consciousness. You get dirty and pathetic; very miserable. It makes me self-conscious to talk about it. There is something corrupt on art. Nothing do with any 'ism' but a thing in nature loses its innocence and becomes a grotesque thing.. ..maybe this difficulty is personal with me, and maybe it is something that other painters have in common. Perhaps it is also something of today. [in conversation with W.C. Seitz]