Willem de Kooning Artist Quotations

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

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.

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

Watercolors is the first and the last thing an artist does.

The idea of space is given to the artist to change if he can. The subject matter in the abstract is space.

If you're an artist, the problem is to make a picture work whether you are happy or not.

The artist fills space with an attitude. The attitude never comes from himself alone.