“Some 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

Source: 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.

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Willem de Kooning 38

Dutch painter 1904–1997

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“I love to experiment with all styles, and do not have any particular prejudice or bias towards any specific style. These works appear, and they turn out, the way they should. I do not decide in what style I want to paint. I am only experimenting. Even Picasso, when he arrived at Cubism, had already experimented with a lot of other styles.”

Guity Novin (1944) artist

Source: Ayandegan (1973), p. 4

“Since all preceding schools of painting have proved that the spirit of beauty does not lie in nature but in the 'I', now that painting in all its various expressions from Giotto to Cézanne has demonstrated that all beauty is in the 'I', that the 'I' is all emotion and that beyond the 'I' nothing can exist because all being exists only in relationship with the 'I', now the time has come to develop from this 'I' a new style. As soon as this 'I' becomes the general, universal 'I' instead of the individualistic or the rationalistic one, the new style will be a general style.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

from his article: 'The new style in painting', in the Dutch journal 'De Avondpost', 2 May 1916
this quote of Van Doesburg is announcing more or less De Stijl movement as a general modern art style
1912 – 1919

“.. no true artist ends with the style that he expected to have when he began,... it is only by giving oneself up completely to the painting medium that one finds oneself and one's own style.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

The School of New York, exhibition catalogue, Perls Gallery, 1951; as quoted in the New York School – the painters & sculptors of the fifties, Irving Sandler, Harper & Row Publishers, 1978, p. 46
1950s

“I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violence, and I am not violent).”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 51, note 63

“Durand likes my paintings, but not the style of execution. His son, the one who went to New York with him, saw them but has not said a word to me.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Durand prefers the old execution, however he grants that my recent paintings have more light - in short, he isn't very keen. My 'Grey Weather' https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Pissarro_-_the-roofs-of-old-rouen-grey-weather-1896.jpg doesn't please him; his son and Caseburne [Durand's cashier] also dislike it.. .It appears that the subject is unpopular. They object to the red roof and backyard just what gave character to the painting which has the stamp of a modern primitive, and they dislike the brick houses, precisely what inspired me..
Quote in a letter, Paris, 27 July 1886, to his son Lucien; in Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 80
1880's

“The one art that is abstract and pure enough to have the one problem and possibility, in our time and timelessness, of the 'one single grand original problem' is pure abstract painting. Abstract painting is not just another school or movement or style but the first truly unmannered and untrammeled and un-entangled, styleless, universal painting. No other art or painting is detached or empty or immaterial enough.”

Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) American painter

Source: 1956 - 1967, Art-as-Art Dogma' part II, (1964), p. 157

“What I really want to do, it seems, is to paint a single form in the middle of a canvas... That's all a painter is, an image maker, is he not? And one would be a fool, some kind of fool, to want to paint a picture. The most powerful instinct is to paint a single form in its continuity, which is after all what a face is. This happens constantly on a picture. I remember last year I became so nervous about what I was doing that I finally reduce it down to the can on the palette with brushes in it. Well, that's real, tat can with brushes. And I painted the an with brushes sticking in it, and I couldn't tolerate it. I couldn't face it. It was as if it didn't contain enough of my thoughts or feelings about it.... I became signs. Exactly.... It seemed to become signs and symbols and I don't like signs.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1950 - 1960, Interview with David Sylvester, BBC (March 1960), pp. 95

“Four years ago almost all of the applauded and selling art was New York School painting. It was preponderant in most galleries, which were uninclined to show anything new. The publications which praised it praised it indiscriminately and were uninterested in new developments. Much of the painting was by the "second generation" many of them epigones. Pollock was dead. Kline and Brooks had painted their last good paintings in 1956 and 1957. Guston's paintings had become soft and gray — his best ones are those around 1954 and 1955. Motherwell's and De Kooning's paintings were somewhat vague. None of these artists were criticized. In 1959 Newman's work was all right, and Rothko's was even better than before. Presumably, though none were shown in New York, Clyfford Still's paintings were all right. This lackadaisical situation was thought perfect. The lesser lights and some of their admirers were incongruously dogmatic : this painting was not only doing well but was the only art for the time. They thought it was a style. By now, it is.”

Donald Judd (1928–1994) artist

Donald Judd, in: Arts Yearbook. (1964) p. 23
1960s

“What relation has a 'doe' to our picture of the world? Does it make any logical, or even artistic, sense, to paint the doe as it appears to our perspective vision, or in a cubistic form because we feel the world cubistically? It feels it as a doe, and its landscape must also be 'doe'… I can paint a picture: the roe; Pisanello has painted such. I can, however, also wish to paint a picture: 'the roe feels'. How infinitely sharper an intellect must the painter have, in order to paint this! The Egyptians have done it. The rose; Manet has painted that. Who has painted the flowering rose? The Indians..”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

Source: 1915 - 1916, 100 Aphorisms', Franz Marc (1915), p. 445

“I can't paint the way they want me to paint and they know that too.
Of course you will say that I ought to be practical and ought to try and paint the way they want me to paint. Well, I will tell you a secret. I have tried and I have tried very hard, but I can't do it. I just can't do it! And that is why I am just a little crazy.”

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) Dutch 17th century painter and etcher

As quoted in R.v.R. : Being an Account of the Last Years and the Death of One Rembrandt Harmenszoon Van Rijn (1930) by Hendrik Willem van Loon
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