Willem de Kooning Quotes

When you think about Dada and the great moments in Modern Art, it's always the sense of when you're not sure that art is most likely to be occurring.

I started getting really curious about art. I read about the Dadaists and the Futurists and the Constructivists - those kind of movements which were reflecting the angst of the people of their times. Their work was trying to lead a movement. I began thinking about what was happening, with painting on the streets and painting on the trains as being similar but also coming from a real, pure space. It wasn't being created by academies. It was a spontaneous combustion of ideas that just happened.

If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice , in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify.

In the grand collage that is Dada, past and future are equally usable.

I'm rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work it's no longer his.

What is an artistic picture? An artistic picture is very simple. The creator is not the producer. The creator is not the star. The creator is the director, the person who realizes the picture, like a poet, like an artist. The creator of the picture is free to do whatever he wants, how he wants to do it. That is an artistic picture.

I don't know if you've noticed it. But Duchamp was magnificent.

My job is to just express something that I want to express. And if I'm ahead or behind the curve, that's for others to decide.

The artist himself is actually the subject in everything after, say, 1900. Eventually, art becomes so removed from the community that you have to know about the artist before you can even look at the painting, because there is a conceptual idea going on.

The freedom of every artist is essential.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

The nice thing about the world that I've been able to inhabit for the last couple of years is that I'm given a lot of freedom. Not all artists really get that.

Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.

No, my work does not reflect my sexual preferences, it reflects the fact that I feel total freedom as an artist.

All of the significant art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art.

Conceptual art became the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus.

In the mid- to late '60s to the mid-'70s, when I was a student, there was a major change in the thinking about what art can be and how art is made.

What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation.

'Art or anti-art?' was the question I asked when I returned from Munich in 1912 and decided to abandon pure painting or painting for its own sake. I thought of introducing elements alien to painting as the only way out of a pictorial and chromatic dead end.

When artists make art, they shouldn't question whether it is permissible to do one thing or another.

There are times when I prefer a cerebral moment with an artist, and I'll just enjoy the wit of a Picabia or a Duchamp. It amuses me that they thought that what they did would be a good way of making art.

Art, unlike the trades in the artistic capacity of fashion and food, can literally be anything. It can be the negation of itself and conceptually not present.

There is a slight problem with being a conceptual artist these days: You won't get paid. But this levels the field and takes the art of money out of the field of serious art. The only conceptual artists who would conceive of making money on the Internet are a lowbrow species known as hustlers.

The 1970s seemed particularly playful. People were trying to make work that couldn't be sold.

The cubism of Braque or Picasso, the dissonant compositions of Schoenberg or Stravinsky, the free-flowing and often erotic choreography of Isadora Duncan and Nijinsky - these were acts of rebellion against the certainties and traditions of the old world.