Carolina QuotesSome painters [of the New York School], including myself, do not care what chair they are sitting on. It does not even have to be a comfortable one. They are too nervous to find out where they ought to sit. They do not want to 'sit in style'. Rather, they have found that painting - any kind of painting, any style of painting - to be painting at all, in fact - is a way of living today, a style of living, so to speak. That is where they form of it lies. It is exactly in its uselessness that it is free. Those artists do not want to conform. They only want to be inspired.
Willem de Kooning Connected to the Carolinas
Source
No citation is recorded for this quotation.
- work
- 'What Abstract Art means to me' (1951)
- year
- 1951
no citation recorded
Cite this record
“Some painters [of the New York School], including myself, do…” Willem de Kooning. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-7451908E02. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/7451908e02
More from 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.
Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity. I do not think.. ..of art as a situation of comfort.
Nature then, is just nature. I admit I am very impressed with it. The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can do for is to put some order in ourselves. When a man ploughs his field at the right time, it means just that.