Carolina QuotesThe point they (Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Tatlin, Gabo, the neo-Plasticists, and so on) all had in common was to be inside and outside at the same time.. .For me, to be inside and outside is to be in an unheated studio with broken windows in the winter, or taking a nap on somebody's porch in the summer.
Willem de Kooning Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Willem de Kooning, MOMA Bull, pp. 7,6, as quoted in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 134.
- year
- 1983
- locator
- pp. 7
Cite this record
“The point they (Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Tatlin, Gabo, the neo-…” Willem de Kooning. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-D3C54374D9. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/d3c54374d9
More from Willem de Kooning
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 don't 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..
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.
I am always in the picture somewhere. The amount of space I use I am always in, I seem to move around in it. And there seems to be a time when I lose sight of what I wanted to do, and then I am out of it. If the picture has a countenance I keep it. If it hasn't, I throw it away.