Women Artists

"I have given up my studio & torn up my father's portrait, & have not touched a brush for six weeks nor ever will again until I see some prospect of getting back to Europe. I am very anxious to go out west next fall & get some employment, but I have not yet decided where."

"O how wild I am to get to work, my fingers farely itch & my eyes water to see a fine picture again."

"M. Degas and Mlle. Cassatt are, nevertheless, the only artists who distinguish themselves.. ..and who offer some attraction and some excuse in the pretentious show of window dressing and infantile daubing."

"It is absolutely necessary, while what I saw yesterday at Miss Cassatt's is still fresh in mind, to tell you [Lucien, his son] about the colored engravings she is to show at Durand-Ruel's at the same time as I. We open Saturday.. .You remember the effects you strove for at Eragny? Well, Miss Cassatt has realized just such effects, and admirably: the tone even, subtle, delicate, without stains on seams: adorable blues, fresh rose, etc."

"She [Mary Cassatt] has infinite talent. I remember the time we started a little magazine called 'Le Jour et La Nuit' together. I was very much interested in processes then, and had made countless experiments [in printing; Degas mainly mono-type - Mary Cassatt mainly etchings].. .You can get extraordinary results with copper; but the trouble is that there are never enough buyers to encourage you to go on with it."

"When I was five years old, my mother took me to the Metropolitan. I remember being overwhelmed by the hush — the glamor of the place. Also I used to be mesmerized by the stained-glass windows in church — but it never occurred to me that anyone made them. I thought they were just there, like trees, chairs, houses and the reproductions on the walls at home. I was always drawing, but I didn't make any connection. Then, by the time I was 10 or 11, other kids were asking me for my drawings and were referring to me as an artist. I hadn't given the matter any thought. I just loved to draw. I loved the activity. But when they bestowed the title on me (by then I was reading about artists and going to museums on my own), I thought, oh yes, I'm an artist, and from then on I took it for granted — and I began to compete. I'd read that Raphael had done something by the age of 12 and I'd get very anxious. I became very time-conscious. If I read about someone's great accomplishment at the age of 20, I'd heave a sigh of relief and feel, maybe there's still time. How did you start? [to Rosalyn Drexler ]"

"In shows selected by artists where there is no consciousness of sex, as in the American Abstract Artist Shows which began in the late 1930's or the Artists Annuals of the early 1950's, the ratio [between male and female artists presented there] seemed to be between one third and one quarter women. The only way to arrive at a true ratio, I suppose, would again be to have artist-juried shows."

"When Miss Nochlin says: 'If women have in fact achieved the same status as men in the arts, then the status quo is fine as it is.' Well, I think the status quo in the arts is fine as it is - in this country [America] at least, women have exactly the same chance that men do. There are the same schools, museums, galleries, books, art stores. There are no obstacles in the way of a woman becoming a painter or sculptor other than the usual obstacles that any artist has to face."

"Well, first—that term, 'women artists.' I was talking to Joan Mitchell at a party about 10 years ago when a man came up to us and said, 'What do you women artists think...' Joan grabbed my arm and said, 'Elaine, let's get the hell out of here.' That was my first response to Linda Nochlin's article ['Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?']. I was curious about how a man would react. Alex Katz thought it would be a cop-out to answer the piece. Sherman thought it would be a cop-out not to answer it. John Cage thought the question 'divisive and an over-simplification.' I agree with all of them."

"Beside my own intense, multiple impressions of him, I also had to contend with his 'world image' created by the endless newspaper photographs, TV appearances, caricatures. Realizing this, I began to collect hundreds of photographs torn from newspapers and magazines and never missed an opportunity to draw him when he appeared on TV. These snapshots covered every angle, from above, below, profile, back, standing, sitting, walking, close-up, off in the distance. I particularly liked tiny shots where the features were indistinct yet unmistakable. Covering my walls with my own sketches and these photographs, I worked from canvas to canvas (the smallest 2 feet high, the largest, 11) always striving for a composite image."

"I began [to portray president Kennedy ] with fragmentary sketches—first in charcoal, then in casein, sometimes just heads, sometimes the whole figure. For the first session (during a Medicare conference), I sat on top of a 6-foot ladder to get an unimpeded view of him. Concentrating on bone structure, most of my first sketches of him made him look twenty years younger. This was also because the positions he assumed were those of a college athlete. I made about thirty sketches at the first session and rushed back to a big studio that had been turned over to me by the Norton Gallery, made further drawing combining different aspects, and finally, after a couple days, decided on the proportions and size of the first canvas—4 by 8 feet. In succeeding sessions of sketching, I was struck by the curious faceted structure of light over his face and hair—a quality of transparent ruddiness. This play of light contributed to the extraordinary variety of expressions."

"One of the reasons I was asked to do the portrait [of president J. F. Kennedy, winter of 1962–63, destined for the Truman Library, Independence, Mo] is that, with luck, I can start and finish a life-size portrait in one sitting (after a couple of preliminary sessions of sketches to determine the pose and familiarize myself with my impression of the sitter). After years of working on my portraits (mostly of friends) for months at a time, I found myself getting bogged down in overly conscientious effort and discovered that by working swiftly I could enter into an almost passive relationship to the canvas and get closer to the essential gesture of the sitter. However, working at top speed this way, I require the absolute immobility of the sitter. This was impossible with President Kennedy because of his extreme restlessness: he read papers, talked on the phone, jotted down notes, crossed and uncrossed his legs, shifted from one arm of the chair to another, always in action at rest. So I had to find a new approach."

"Nowadays, when an artist discovers 'the sky,' it's like a bride who has never done any housework raving about her first vacuum cleaner. It's just not news." (Yet she confessed that the experience prompted her to deviate from a more controlled linear style and work freely with lively, confrontational colors directly influenced by the Southwest)"

"I always say I'm an escape artist, Style is something I've always tried to avoid. I'm more interested in character. Character comes out of the work. Style is applied or imposed on it."

"[In the past] women painted women: Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Mary Cassatt, and so forth. And I thought, men always painted the opposite sex, and I wanted to paint men as sex objects."

"Always when I look at anyone's art, I get flashes of the person. If I walk into a room and there's a painting by Joan Mitchell, I say, "There's Joannie." Or Grace, if it's Grace Hartigan. And to me all art is self-portraits."

"Bill [Willem de Kooning] was working on a huge canvas. It was black and white. And I said to him, 'It's very curious.' You know, I came into the studio. I had my separate studio and I walked in and I said, 'It's very curious. There are no treelike shapes in that painting. The forms are all like animals more or less and organic shapes that don't resemble the forest at all, but I get the feeling of Faulkner forest from that painting.' Bill said, 'That's extraordinary.' And he went over and lifted up a pile of papers and underneath was a book by Faulkner and later he named a painting 'Light in August' [he painted in 1946]."

"When I painted Frank O'Hara, [in 1962] Frank was standing there. First I painted the whole structure of his face; then I wiped out the face, and when the face was gone, it was more Frank than when the face was there."

"Mrs. de Kooning, who was married to the artist Willem de Kooning, was a highly versatile painter whose work ranged from realism to abstraction but was grounded in the gestural Abstract Expressionism of the New York School. Her landscapes, portraits and studies of athletes in action were notable for their verve and freshness."

"A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image."

"One of Elaine's friends asked her later in life what it was like to work in the shadow of Willem de Kooning, curator Brandon Fortune says. And her reply was: 'I don't paint in his shadow, I paint in his light.'"

"Gesture is so well executed in Elaine's portraits that in a number of them she deliberately erased some or all of the facial features. This is true in several images of the painter's brother Conrad Fried, and of her fellow painter Fairfield Porter. An early critic, otherwise complimentary, wondered if she was unable to draw or paint faces. Nothing could be further from the truth, as many of her other portraits attest. But Elaine often said the face's features change with age, while the way one sits, stands or moves is more of a constant throughout one's life. Her figures often seem to be quiet and in movement simultaneously."

"It's time for a disclaimer. Elaine de Kooning and I were friends. She was a great mentor to me, and in memory continues to be. We met during her time at UNM. I was an incipient poet, she already an accomplished painter. But I was able to introduce her to the bullfights in Ciudad Juárez, a subject she would paint for many years. I followed her back to New York (as did several others who knew her here) and we remained friends until her death. March 12th would have been Elaine's 97th birthday. I wished this honoring of her work could have happened when she was alive, or that she might have lived to experience it."

"It was Elaine de Kooning who perhaps best described the nature of Abstract Expressionism when she wrote: 'The main difference, then, between abstract and non-abstract art is that the abstract artists does not have to choose a subject. But whether or not he chooses, he always ends up with one.'"

"After Elaine de Kooning returned to New York from teaching at the University of New Mexico, her studio burst with energetic paintings based on bullfights in Juárez, Mexico, and the expansive western landscape. De Kooning dryly observed 'Nowadays, when an artist discovers 'the sky,' it's like a bride who has never done any housework raving about her first vacuum cleaner. It's just not news.' Yet she confessed that the experience prompted her to deviate from a more controlled linear style and work freely with lively, confrontational colors directly influenced by the Southwest."

"When I painted my seated men, I saw them as gyroscopes. Portraiture always fascinated me because I love the particular gesture of a particular expression or stance.. .Working on the figure, I wanted paint to sweep through as feelings sweep through.."

"I think there are too damn many institutions on the face of the earth as it is. Robert Graves said: 'As soon as women organize themselves in the male way with societies, memberships and rules, everything goes wrong.' I think that applies to artists, too. The artist stands for everything against institutions.. [Rosalyn Drexler reacted: 'Institutions and clear thought are opposites. You can't have one with the other']. Right! Institution to me means authority, coercion, mindlessness, bureaucracy; it means the Pentagon, the CIA, the army, organized denominational religion, prisons, mental hospitals."

"I was overjoyed when I was taken to a show of the American Abstract Artists Group in '37. They were all alive and they were American! My escort further interested me when he told me the two best abstract artists in America were not in the show — Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, whom I met a couple of months later — when I began to study with him [with Willem de Kooning]. When Miss Nochlin says, 'What is important is that women face up to the reality of their history,' well, the point is, artists are always choosing their history from day to day and their history follows them as much as it precedes them. Were American artists 'facing up to the reality of their history' when they turned to the School of Paris or to German Expressionism or Dada or Surrealism or de Stijl or the Bauhaus instead of to Copley, Peale, Eakins, Blake or Ryder; was Picasso facing up to the reality of his history when he was snooping around African art for inspiration?"

"I reacted to Cézanne almost the same way as you [= Rosalyn Drexler ], the first time I saw him when I was 14.. .Then I saw my first Cezanne and it jolted me. It was a 'Bathers' [Cézanne painted several of them]. I didn't think he drew well at all. I thought the figures looked stiff and wooden, but I was enthralled by it. I knew there was something there that was going to take me a lifetime to understand. What I took to be the crudity of his technique — that opened a door for me. I began to look at everything differently. That was the year [1932] I discovered Matisse, Picasso, Degas, Soutine — I began to go to the Museum of Modern Art every week. At the same time, I loved New Yorker covers — and El Greco. I didn't mind mixing things up. Nobody was going to tell me what to like or what not to like. Until I was 17 I thought all real artists (I didn't count commercial artists) were dead or foreign with the exceptions of Georgia O'Keeffe and John Marin, whose work I had seen at 'An American Place'."

"I wanted to learn Go, so I paid a go school and started to attend classes once a week with a pro. He was mean, and never let the students win the teaching games. This was frustrating to me, because I was thinking "Why am I paying to lose all the time?" I wished that I had a guardian angel or a ghost that could help me beat him really bad. It was at that moment that Hikaru no Go was born."

"All you are is the Go you play."

"To link the far past, with the far future."

"This is the universe! And I'm placing stones one by one on that. Like I'm increasing the number of stars one by one... I'm making the universe. It's like I'm a God. I'm going to become a God! On this Go Board."

"The Saturday arguments about photography as a machine art are answered by the best photographers. "If the camera were a machine!" Berenice Abbott said, "with the precision and the flexibility, the accommodation and power of machines as we know them today!" And "Our lighting has not been begun," she said. "We need a light as good as sunlight-better than sunlight.""

"People say they have to express their emotions. I’m sick of that. Photography doesn’t teach you how to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see."

"Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself."

"The Baroness was like Jesus Christ and Shakespeare all rolled into one and perhaps she was the most influential person to me in the early part of my life."

"I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time. Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism—real life—the now."

"Suppose we took a thousand negatives and made a gigantic montage: a myriad-faceted picture containing the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the sad faces, the triumphant faces, the power, the irony, the strength, the decay, the past, the present, the future of a city – that would be my favorite picture."

"I wanted to photograph this subject because the signs’ shrieking blatancy literally cried out for a visual record. To my mind the faded, yellowing paper and the red paint were not particularly paint,able. In black and white the signs shouted, clamored for attention, in visual anarchy. At the same time, the shrewd business sense which plastered them solid over the entire window area produced, as it were by chance, an esthetic by-product: the whole has homogeneity and variety of texture, simultaneously, which give the picture interest."

"England is very, very important to me, because in my family the English could do no wrong. When my father picked a mistress, it was always an English girl: if he made her pregnant, she could be shipped back to England and he would not be held responsible. It never happened, but I've made a lot of work called The English Can Do No Wrong."

"At the dinner table when I was very little, I would hear people bickering – the father saying something, the mother choosing to defend herself. To escape the bickering, I started modelling the soft bread with my fingers. With the dough of the French bread – sometimes it was still warm – I would make little figures. And I would line them up on the table and this was really my first sculpture."

"I have drawn my whole life. My parents were in the tapestry restoration business, and as a young girl, I would draw in the missing parts of the tapestry that needed to be re-woven. My ability to draw made me indispensable to my parents."

"Art is a guaranty of sanity."

"Women had to work like slaves in the art world, but a lot of men got to the top through their charm. And it hurt them. To be young and pretty didn't help a woman in the art world, because the social scene, and the buying scene, was in the hands of women – women who had money. They wanted male artists who would come alone and be their charming guests. Rothko could be very charming. It was a court. And the artist buffoons came to the court to entertain, to charm. Now it has changed, now the younger men are in – older women and younger men."

"I became aware of Louise Bourgeois in my first or second year at Brighton Art College. One of my teachers, Stuart Morgan, curated a small retrospective of her work at the Serpentine, and both he and another teacher, Edward Allington, saw something in her, and me, and thought I should be aware of her. I thought the work was wonderful. It was her very early pieces, The Blind Leading the Blind, the wooden pieces and some of the later bronze works. Biographically, I don't really think she has influenced me, but I think there are similarities in our work. We have both used the home as a kind of kick-off point, as the space that starts the thoughts of a body of work. I eventually got to meet Louise in New York, soon after I made House. She asked to see me because she had seen a picture of House in the New York Times while she was ironing it one morning, so she said. She was wonderful and slightly kind of nutty; very interested and eccentric. She drew the whole time; it was very much a salon with me there as her audience, watching her. I remember her remarking that I was shorter than she was. I don't know if this was true but she was commenting on the physicality of making such big work and us being relatively small women. When you meet her you don't know what's true, because she makes things up. She has spun her web and drawn people in, and eaten a few people along the way."

"I came from a family of repairers. The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn't get mad. She weaves and repairs it."

"What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself."

"The feminists took me as a role model, as a mother. It bothers me. I am not interested in being a mother. I am still a girl trying to understand myself."

"I do not need the musing of the philosophers to tell me what I am doing. It would be more interesting to let me know why I am doing it."