Nowadays, when an artist discovers 'the sky,' it's like a bride who has never done any housework raving about her first vacuum cleaner. It's just not news." (Yet she confessed that the experience prompted her to deviate from a more controlled linear style and work freely with lively, confrontational colors directly influenced by the Southwest)
Elaine de Kooning Connected to the Carolinas
Source
as quoted on Portrait of the Art world - A Century of art News, Photographs], referring to the photo of w:Rudolph Burckhardt's Gelatin silver print, 1960 (printed 2002), Published December 1960; Estate of Rudolph Burckhardt; courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York City — Quote, after Elaine de Kooning was returned to New York from her teaching at the University of New Mexico [her studio was full of energetic paintings of bullfights in Juárez, Mexico, and of the expansive western landscape when Burckhardt portrayed her there.]
- year
- 1960
Cite this record
“Nowadays, when an artist discovers 'the sky,' it's like a br…” Elaine de Kooning. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-4C84D34380. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/4c84d34380
More from Elaine de Kooning
When I painted my seated men, I saw them as gyroscopes. Portraiture always fascinated me because I love the particular gesture of a particular expression or stance.. .Working on the figure, I wanted paint to sweep through as feelings sweep through..
Always when I look at anyone's art, I get flashes of the person. If I walk into a room and there's a painting by Joan Mitchell, I say, "There's Joannie." Or Grace, if it's Grace Hartigan. And to me all art is self-portraits.
I was overjoyed when I was taken to a show of the American Abstract Artists Group in '37. They were all alive and they were American! My escort further interested me when he told me the two best abstract artists in America were not in the show — Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, whom I met a couple of months later — when I began to study with him [with Willem de Kooning]. When Miss Nochlin says, 'What is important is that women face up to the reality of their history,' well, the point is, artists are always choosing their history from day to day and their history follows them as much as it precedes them. Were American artists 'facing up to the reality of their history' when they turned to the School of Paris or to German Expressionism or Dada or Surrealism or de Stijl or the Bauhaus instead of to Copley, Peale, Eakins, Blake or Ryder; was Picasso facing up to the reality of his history when he was snooping around African art for inspiration?