Willem de Kooning: Likeness

“There is a time when you just take a walk.... you walk in your own landscape... It has an innocence that is kind of a grand feeling... Somehow I have the feeling that old man Monet might have felt like that, just simple in front of things, or old man Cézanne too... I really understand them now.”

Willem de Kooning

(1980's)as quoted in 'A painter's testament: De Kooning in the Eighties', Robert Storr, Moma-website http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/1997/dekooning/essay.html, reprinted in 1997
1980's

Feeling , Understanding , Time

“I 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

As quoted in Willem De Kooning, 1904-1997: Content as a Glimpse by Barbara Hess, 2004.
1990's & from posthumous publications

Feeling , Time , Help

“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.”

Willem de Kooning

De Kooning's speech 'What Abstract Art means to me' on the symposium 'What is Abstract At' - at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 5 February, 1951, n.p.
1950's

Thinking , Passion , Winter , Time

“I feel now if I think of it, it will come out in the painting. In other words, if I want to make the whole painting look like a bottle, like a lot of bottles - for instance maybe the end of the day, when everything is very light, but not in sunlight necessarily - and so if I have this image of this bottle and if I really think about it, it will come out in the painting. That doesn’t mean that people notice a bottle, but I know when I succeed in it – then the painting would have this.”

Willem de Kooning

interview conducted by David Sylvester for the BBC, 1962; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 49.
1960's

People , Feeling , Thinking , Light

“I feel sometimes an American artist must feel, like a baseball player or something - a member of a team writing American history..”

Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning (1969) by Thomas B. Hess, Content Is A Glimpse, excerpts from an interview with David Sylvester, (BBC), Location, vol.1 no.1 Spring 1963.
1960's

Feeling , History

“I think I would choose Soutine... I've always been crazy about Soutine - all of his paintings. Maybe it's the lushness of the paint. He builds up a surface that looks like a material, like a substance. There's a kind of transfiguration, a certain fleshiness in his work... I remember when I first saw the Soutine's in the Barnes Collection.... the Matisse's had a light of their own, but the Soutine's had a glow that came from within the paintings - it was another kind of light.”

Willem de Kooning

The impact of Chaim Soutine (1893-1943): de Kooning, Pollock, Dubuffet, Bacon, publisher: Hatje Cantz, Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne (Köln), 2001.
Answer on the question who is his favourite artist, probably made around 1977.
1990's & from posthumous publications

Thinking , Light , Painting

“Certain artists and critics attacked me for painting the 'Women' [series of paintings, De kooning started in 1950], but I felt that this was their problem, not mine. I don’t really feel like a non-objective painter at all... It's really absurd to make an image, like a human image. With paint, today, when you think about it, since we have this problem of doing it or not doing it. But then all of a sudden it was even more absurd not to do it. So I fear I have to follow my desires.”

Willem de Kooning

interview conducted by David Sylvester for the BBC, 1962; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 45.
1960's

Women , Fear , Feeling , Problem

“The potato seems like a Romantic (organic) object.... you can watch it growing if you don’t eat it. It is going to change – grow, rot, disappear. A pebble is like a Classical thing – it changes little if any... If it was big you could keep the dead down with it.... The Classical idea is not around much anymore. [Der Koning is comparing the Potatoes of Vincent Van Gogh to the Pebbles of Jean Arp.”

Willem de Kooning

Artist Club, 22 February 1952, as quoted in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 102
1950's

Idea , Change , Dead

“Kandinsky understood 'form' as a form, like an object in the real world; and a object, he said, was a narrative – and so, of course, he disapproved of it. He wanted ‘his music without words’. He wanted to be 'simple as a child'. He intended, with his 'inner-self' to rid himself of 'philosophical barricades' (he sat down and wrote something about all this). But in turn his own writing has become a philosophical barricade, even it is a barricade full of holes. It offers a kind of Middle European idea of Buddhism or, anyhow, something too theosophical for me.”

Willem de Kooning

De Kooning's speech 'What Abstract Art means to me' on the symposium 'What is Abstract At' - at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 5 February, 1951, n.p.
1950's

World , Music , Idea

“No, the artists are in a state of belated Age of Reason. They want to get hold of things, like Mondrian. He was a fantastic artist, but now when we read his ideas and his idea of Neo-Plasticism [= De Stijl ] – pure plasticity – it’s kind of silly, I think. I mean, not for him, but I think one could spend one's life having this desire to be in and outside at the same time. He could see a future life and a future city – not like me, who am absolutely not interested in seeing the future city. I'm perfectly happy to be alive now.”

Willem de Kooning

Quote of De Kooning from 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. 49
1960's

Life , Age , Idea , Thinking

“You know the real world, this so-called real world, is just something you put up with. Like everybody else. I'm in my element when I am a little bit out of this world. Then I'm in the real world – I'm on the beam. Because when I'm falling, I'm doing all right. When I'm slipping, I say: he, this is interesting. It's when I'm standing upright that bothers me.”

Willem de Kooning

Quote from film script Sketchbook 1, Time inc; 1960.
1960's

World

“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.”

Willem de Kooning

interview conducted by David Sylvester for the BBC, 1962; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 50.
1960's

Color , Way , Sense , Painting

“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..”

Willem de Kooning

Quote from De Kooning's lecture Trans/formation, at Studio 35, 1950.
1950's

Life , Beauty , Art , Soul

“The pictures [De Kooning had] done since the 'Women', they're emotions, most of them. Most of them are landscapes and highways and sensations of that, outside the city – with the feeling of going to the city or coming from it. I am not a pastoral character. I'm not a – how do you say that? – 'country dumpling'. I am here and I like New York City. But I love to go out in a car… I'm just crazy about going over the roads and highways.”

Willem de Kooning

Interview conducted by David Sylvester for the BBC, 1962; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 48.
1960's

Love , Women , Cars , Feeling

“Personally, I do not need a movement. What was given to me, I take for granted. Of all movements, I like Cubism most. It had that wonderful unsure atmosphere of reflection - a poetic frame where something could be possible, where an artist could practise [sic] his intuition. It didn't want to get rid of what went before. Instead it added something to it. The parts that I can appreciate in other [art] movements came out of Cubism. Cubism became a movement, it didn't set out to be one. It has force in it, but it was no 'force-movement.' And then there is that one-man movement, Marcel Duchamp - for me a truly modern movement because it implies that each artist can do what he thinks he ought to - a movement for each person and open for everybody.”

Willem de Kooning

De Kooning's speech 'What Abstract Art means to me' on the symposium 'What is Abstract At' - at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 5 February, 1951, n.p.
1950's

Art , Thinking , Parting , Personality