Carolina QuotesI had my own eyes, but I wasn't always looking in the right direction. I was certainly in need of a helping hand at times. Now I feel like Manet who said, "Yes, I am influenced by everybody. But every time I put my hands in my pockets I find someone else's fingers there."
Willem de Kooning Connected to the Carolinas
Source
As quoted in Willem De Kooning, 1904-1997: Content as a Glimpse by Barbara Hess, 2004.
- work
- 1990s & from posthumous publications
- year
- 1904
Cite this record
“I had my own eyes, but I wasn't always looking in the right …” Willem de Kooning. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-F27D9CE399. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/f27d9ce399
More from Willem de Kooning
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.
The 'Women' [paintings] had to do with the female painted through all ages, all those idols, and maybe I was stuck to a certain extent; I couldn't go on. It did one thing for me: it eliminated composition, arrangement, relationships, light – all this silly talk about line, colour and form – because that was the thing I wanted to get hold of.
But 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.