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Willem De Kooning 1904 – 1997

Woman, oil on canvas 1949-50

Composition, Oil, enamel, and charcoal on canvas. 1955

For the painter to come to the "abstract" or the "nothing," he needed many things. Those things were always things in life-a horse, a flower, a milk¬maid, the light in a room through a window made of diamond shapes maybe, tables, chairs, and so forth. The painter, it is true, was not always completely free. The things were not always of his own choice, but because of that he often got some new ideas. Some painters liked to paint things already chosen by others, and after being abstract about them, were called classicists. Others wanted to select the things themselves and, after being abstract about them, were called romanticists. Of course, they got mixed up with one another a lot too. Anyhow, at that time, they were not abstract about something which was already abstract. They freed the shapes, the light, the color, the space, by putting them into concrete things in a given situation. They did think about the possibility that the things-the horse, the chair, the man were abstractions, but they let that go, because if they kept thinking about it, they would have been led to give up painting altogether, and would probably have ended up in the philosopher's tower. When they got those strange, deep ideas, they got rid of them by painting a particular smile on one of the faces in the picture they were working on.
Kandinsky understood "form" as a form, like an object in the real world; and an 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 if it is a barricade full of holes. It offers a kind of Middle European idea of Buddhism or, anyhow, something too theosophical for me.
The sentiment of the Futurists was simpler. No space. Everything ought to keep on going! That's probably the reason they went themselves. Either a man was a machine or else a sacrifice to make machines with.
The moral attitude of Neoplasticism is very much like that of Construc¬tivism, except that the Constructivists wanted to bring things out in the open and the Neoplasticists didn't want anything left over.

Two trees on Mary Street . . . Amen! Oil on canvas. 1975

Untitled XX, Oil on canvas. 1982

I have learned a lot from all of them and they have confused me plenty too. One thing is certain; they didn't give me my natural aptitude for drawing. I am completely weary of their ideas now.
Spiritually I am wherever my spirit allows me to be, and that is not necessarily in the future. I have no nostalgia, however. If I am confronted with one of those small Mesopotamian figures, I have no nostalgia for it but, instead, I may get into a state of anxiety. 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 inside or outside - or of art in general - as a situation of comfort. I know there is a terrific idea there somewhere, but whenever I want to get into it, I get a feeling of apathy and want to lie down and go to sleep. Some painters, 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 the 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.
The argument often used that science is really abstract, and that painting could be like music and, for this reason, that you cannot paint a man leaning against a lamppost, is utterly ridiculous. That space of science-the space of the physicists-I am truly bored with by now. Their lenses are so thick that, seen through them, the space gets more and more melancholy. There seems to be no end to the misery of the scientists' space. All that it contains is billions and billions of hunks of matter, hot or cold, floating around in darkness according to a great design of aimlessness. The stars I think about, if I could fly, I could reach in a few old-fashioned days. But physicists' stars I use as buttons, buttoning up curtains of emptiness. If I stretch my arms next to the rest of myself and wonder where my fingers are-that is all the space I need as a painter.
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 practice 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 movements came out of Cubism. Cubism became a movement; it didn't set out to be one. (1951)

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