A Quote by Willem de Kooning

Maybe in that earlier phase I was painting the woman in me. Art isn't a wholly masculine occupation, you know. — © Willem de Kooning
Maybe in that earlier phase I was painting the woman in me. Art isn't a wholly masculine occupation, you know.
There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.
For me, architecture is an art the same as painting is an art or sculpture is an art. Yet, architecture moves a step beyond painting and sculpture because it is more than using materials. Architecture responds to functional outputs and environmental factors. Yet, fundamentally, it is important for me to stress the art in architecture to bring harmony.
Perhaps, you know, new laws, new domains of potential openness are occurring as the universe ages, and complexity previously disallowed is now possible, and we are that complexity. We are nature moving out of its genetic phase - a phase under the control of chemical genes, which are physical structures, in to an epigenetic phase, a phase of culture ruled by codes, transformable culturally confined codes - mathematics, religion, philosophy, art, dance, humor.
I loved surrealism and abstract painting, and anything related to those. I always thought painting was the highest form of art. What led me to drawing was seeing so much self-important, pretentious, conceptual-type art in university. I wanted to reject that by making quick, fun art.
I made a few mistakes in the earlier phase of my career and I know that I won't be repeating them again.
Maybe in any art you have to be wholly you in the context of whatever you're doing.
It is harder to be a lifter than a bodybuilder...lifting is purely masculine whereas bodybuilding entails feminine traits. Bodybuilding reminds me of a woman getting ready to go somewhere. Can you tell me that greasing your body up and posing in front of a mirror is masculine? A bodybuilder puts strength secondary to his physique, whereas the lifter puts strength foremost because it is more masculine to do so.
Whenever you have to do a photo shoot with a woman, there is this weird competition. They need to prove something. They need to play games - maybe unconsciously - but women are so sensitive, and people call me more masculine sometimes.
There is something about permanent military occupation which seems to confine a man's scope and limit his opportunities; and after he has had a few years under the circumscribed conditions of official routine, he generally find himself wholly out of touch with civil occupation.
Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.
I was doing something that the officials or art commission probably didn't consider important... I was experimenting with different kinds of realistic art, impressionism and the more decorative compositions of different forms of painting, which took away from the earlier photographic realism that I was doing.
'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.
I'm not anti conceptual art. I don't think painting must be revived, exactly. Art reflects life, and our lives are full of algorithms, so a lot of people are going to want to make art that's like an algorithm. But my language is painting, and painting is the opposite of that. There's something primal about it. It's innate, the need to make marks. That's why, when you're a child, you scribble.
I am but a poor struggling soul yearning to be wholly good, wholly truthful and wholly non-violent in thought, word and deed, but ever failing to reach the ideal which I know to be true. It is a painful climb, but each step upwards makes me feel stronger and fit for the next.
You know, the way art history is taught, often there's nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.
Because the true perfection of a practical occupation consists not only in knowing the actual performance of the occupation but also in its explanation, why the work is done a in a particular way, and because the art of calculating is a practical occupation, it is clear that it is pertinent to concern oneself with the theory.
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