"The beauty of comfort.. .To compose with curves like that, and angles, and make works of art with them could only make people happy, they maintained, for the only association was one of comfort.. .This pure form of comfort became the comfort of 'pure form.' The 'nothing' part in a painting until then—the part that was not painted but that was there because of the things in the picture which were painted—had a lot of descriptive labels attached to it like 'beauty,' 'lyric,' 'form,' 'profound,' 'space,' 'expression,' 'classic,' 'feeling,' 'epic,' 'romantic,' 'pure,' 'balance,' etc. Anyhow that 'nothing' which was always recognized as a particular something—and as something particular—they generalized, with their book-keeping minds, into circles and squares. They had the innocent idea that the "something" existed 'in spite of' and not 'because of' and that this something was the only thing that truly mattered."
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Willem de Kooning, in his speech 'What Abstract Art means to me' on the symposium 'What is Abstract Art', at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 5 February, 1951, n.p.
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Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning (24 April 1904 – 19 March 1997) was an abstract expressionist painter, born in Rotterdam, Netherlands, who settled in the United States. Along with Jackson Pollock, and others, he was an exponent of Abstract expressionism. Initially, he was strongly influenced by Picasso, Cubism, and Chaim Soutine. He was married with Elaine de Kooning and closely befriended with Arshile Gorky; later with Franz Kline.
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