Carolina QuotesBut I find, because of modern painting, that things which couldn't be seen in terms of painting, things you couldn't paint.. ..it is not that you paint them, bit is the connection. I imagine that Cézanne, when he painted a ginger pot with apples, must have been very grotesque in his day, because a still life was something set up of beautiful things. It may be very difficult, for instance, to put a Rheingold bottled beer on the table and a couple of glasses and a package of Lucky Strike [cigarets]. I mean, you know, there are certain things you cannot paintat a particular time, and it takes a certain attitude how to see those things, in terms of art.
Willem de Kooning Connected to the Carolinas
Source
In an interview (March 1960) with David Sylvester, edited for broadcasting by the BBC first published in 'Location', Spring 1963; as quoted in Interviews with American Artists, by David Sylvester; Chatto & Windus, London 2001, p. 54
- form
- interview
- year
- 1960
- locator
- p. 54
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“But I find, because of modern painting, that things which co…” Willem de Kooning. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-E4D88ABEAC. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/e4d88abeac
More from Willem de Kooning
I make a little mystique for myself. Since I have no preference or so-called sense of color, I could take almost everything that could be some accident of a previous painting. Or I set out to make a series. I take, for instance, some pictures where I take a color, some arbitrary color I took from some place. Well, this is gray maybe, and I mix the color for that, and then I find out that when I am through with getting the color the way I want it, I have six other colors in it, to get that color; and then I take those six colors and I use them also with this color. It is probably like a composer does a variation on a certain theme. But it isn't technical, it isn't just fun.
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...
I still think that Boccioni was a great artist and a passionate man. I like El Lissitsky's painting very much. But Mondrian that great merciless artist, is the only one who had nothing left over. The point they all had in common was to be both inside and outside at the same time. A new of likeness!. ..for me to be inside and outside is to be in an unheated studio with broken windows in the winter.