Willem de Kooning Art Quotations

Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Art should not have to be a certain way,

the word 'abstract' comes from the light tower of the philosophers ... one of their spotlights that they have particularly focussed on 'Art' ... (abstraction was) not so much what you could paint but rather what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that subject matter came into existence as something you ought not have.

An artist is someone who makes art... He didn't invent it...

Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity. I do not think... of art as a situation of comfort.

Once, after finishing a picture, I thought I would stop for awhile, take a trip, do things-the next time I thought of this, I found five years had gone by.

In art one idea is as good as another.

Maybe in that earlier phase I was painting the woman in me. Art isn't a wholly masculine occupation, you know.

Spiritually I am wherever my spirit allows me to be, and that is not necessarily in the future... Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure...