Women From The United States

"Agency theory is an important, yet controversial, theory. This paper reviews agency theory, its contributions to organization theory, and the extant empirical work and develops testable propositions. The conclusions are that agency theory (a) offers unique insight into information systems, outcome uncertainty, incentives, and risk and (b) is an empirically valid perspective, particularly when coupled with complementary perspectives. The principal recommendation is to incorporate an agency perspective in studies of the many problems having a cooperative structure."

"Recent organizational approaches to control (e.g., Ouchi 1979) suggest two underlying control strategies. On the one hand, control can be accomplished through performance evaluation. Performance evaluation refers to the cybernetic process of monitoring and rewarding performance. This strategy emphasizes the information aspects of control. Namely, to what degree can the various aspects of performance be assessed? Alternatively, control can be achieved by minimizing the divergence of preferences among organizational members. That is, members cooperate in the achievement of organizational goals because the members understand and have internalized these goals. This strategy emphasizes people policies such as selection, training, and socialization."

"Organizational design often focuses on structural alternatives such as matrix, decentralization, and divisionalization. However, control variables (e.g., reward structures, task characteristics, and information systems) offer a more flexible approach. The purpose of this paper is to explore these control variables for organizational design. This is accomplished by integration and testing of two perspectives, organization theory and economics, notably agency theory. The resulting hypotheses link task characteristics, information systems, and business uncertainty to behavior vs. outcome based control strategy. These hypothesized linkages are examined empirically in a field study of the compensation practices for retail salespeople in 54 stores. The findings are that task programmability is strongly related to the choice of compensation package. The amount of behavioral measurement, the cost of measuring outcomes, and the uncertainty of the business also affect compensation. The findings have management implications for the design of compensation and reward packages, performance evaluation systems, and control systems, in general. Such systems should explicitly consider the task, the information system in place to measure performance, and the riskiness of the business. More programmed tasks require behavior based controls while less programmed tasks require more elaborate information systems or outcome based controls."

"As far too many know, it is the small, loving acts that help an enormous amount in times of grief. My father is good with advice, as you might guess, but he keeps it short, and the takeaway is usually the same: to help us find our own way, and our own gifts. If you do what you love, hold nothing back, and never let fear of failure get in the way, then you've pretty much figured out the Trump formula."

"It's often said that with enough effort and determination you can do whatever you put your mind to. But saying those words and living them are different things, and my father has lived them. It's one of his defining qualities and I've seen it in action all of my life. Whatever he does, he gives his all and does it well. His desire for excellence is contagious. He possesses a unique gift for bringing that trait out in others, starting with those closest to him. He's always helped me be the best version of myself by encouragement and by example. He motivates me to work my hardest and to always stay true to who I am and what I believe. That's what he does: he draws out the talent and drive in people so that they can achieve their full potential. That's a great quality to have in a father and better yet in the president of the United States."

"Firstly, because one suffers from being forced to dwell in a house steadily falling to decay; a trial to the housekeeper, arousing a sense of some innate incompetence that the beams of the building should sag, doors open difficultly, windows dim with the dust of time, the outer complexion of the house grow streaked and grey with the weathering of many seasons. There is a certain desperation in the realization that no repairs are possible... one braces one’s self to accept courageously the wrongs of time; to wear the lichens and mosses with silent gallantry."

"No ruler is ever really dethroned by his subjects. No hand but his own ever takes the crown from his head... When he ceases to lead... the revolt which casts him from power is only the outward manifestation of his previous abdication."

"[Perhaps] the potency of fever, of drugs, of alcohol, or of mania may open up deeps of memory, of primordial memory, that are closed to the milder magic of sleep. The subtle poison in the grape may gnaw through the walls of Time and give the memory sight of those terrible days when we wallowed — nameless shapes — in the primaeval slime."

"The record of the race, hitherto accepted as the truth about ourselves, has been the story of facts and conditions as the male saw them – or wished to see them... No secret has been so well-kept as the secret of what women have thought about life."

"It was well to have thus once really lived."

"Even in my childhood my sympathy for the heroes in the fairy tales was always keenest at the moment when they waved their hands in farewell and turned their faces at last towards the magical adventures that stalked about impatiently awaiting their advent in the strange countries where their havens lay."

"To the masculine mind there appears to be something strangely exhilarating in the thought of a woman being abruptly torn from her home without sufficient time to put her wardrobe in order, and to all the men responsible for this voyage the most delightful feature apparently of the whole affair was the fact that I should be forced to get ready in five hours for a seventy-five days' voyage around the world."

"Privacy is something that we maintain for the good of ourselves and others."

"I'd have to lock the door of the paint room. He wouldn't allow anyone in. I was like a prisoner."

"I had just announced for the first time publicly on a radio show in San Francisco that I had done all the Keane paintings and not my ex-husband. And this, um, Bill Flang of the San Francisco Examiner thought that Walter and I should appear in Union Square and have a paint-off to decide who had done the paintings, since I was—said that I had done them. So, he arranged it, and LIFE magazine as there and all the different newspapers and t.v. stations and they, uh—some of them in the audience played "High Noon"—[laughs] And, of course, Walter didn't show up."

"It was the eyes that did it. [timid giggle] I liked the way he painted eyes and he liked mine."

"M, you see, is four, and D is four too, and H is eight, and four and four and eight are sixteen, which is made up of one and six, which make seven—my number."

"He can't paint eyes. He couldn't learn to paint at all."

"But what I like most about Keane, myself, is that he's mass-produced, like a factory."

"I think what Keane has done is just terrific. It has to be good. If it were bad, so many people wouldn't like it."

"Margaret is probably the greatest woman painter alive."

"And Margaret, uh, has done a lot of experimenting in her work. I think, probably, no artist has experimented the way Margaret has."

"His art is in heroic bad taste. It's incredibly vulgar, it's weird, but it's still gorgeous. Bad-taste entertainment is the best entertainment. What I really love about Keane is that he is so commercial."

"I finally got to the point where I decided I don't care if it's good art or bad art, it's what I do. I enjoy doing it, and people like it."

"I still paint sad children, because there's sadness in the world, but they have hope, and I have hope."

"I lost all respect for him and myself, and lived in a nightmare."

"Children do have big eyes. When I'm doing a portrait, the eyes are the most expressive part of the face. And they just got bigger and bigger and bigger."

"Walter was extremely charming. He could charm anybody, especially women."

"He'd threatened me so many times. I thought he was so crazy he could hire a hit man to come get me anytime."

"The older I get, the brighter colours I live. But in the past, they were dark, dingy, sad colours."

"A lot of art today doesn't convey much hope, and I hope mine does. I try to paint what I think the future holds and my innermost feelings about God's promise for the future."

"Gradually it dawned on me that I was painting my own inner emotions. Those children were asking: "Why are we here? What is life all about? Why is there sadness and injustice?" All those deep questions. Those children were sad because they didn't have the answers. They were searching."

"I don't make drips [in her painting] purposely. This drip business is a pile of shit. If I see them, I take them out [of her painting] like cleaning the house."

"There are those fleeting moments, those almost 'supernatural states of soul', as Baudelaire call them, during which 'the profundity of life is entirely revealed in any scene, however ordinary, that presents itself for one. The scene becomes its symbol.' Miss Mitchel attempts to paint this sign, to recreate both the recalled landscape and the frame of mind she was in originally. Memory, as a storehouse of indelible images become her creative domain.. .The lack of yearning for any length of time causes an inquietude and despondency, a sedulous longing for the yearning. Miss Mitchell paints to reawaken this desire."

"..he [ Samuel Beckett ] would pore for hours over the intricacies of the paint and the patterns. He liked her refusal to explain or justify her art, since it reflected his own inability and unwillingness to discuss his writings.. .She was the one person with whom he could drink, talk, relax, and her friendship became a crutch he leaned on heavily. [Paris, c. 1952 – 1956]"

"That's where, I think, I changed for that 'Grande Vallée' subject [a large series of 'natural' paintings, Joan painted during 1982-83], which was really not a subject - the 'Grande Vallée' was a [wild vast] place where this Gisele Barreaux [composer] played with her cousin when they were children, and the cousin, aged 28, died of cancer. And she told me he said to her [when he was dying in 1982], 'If we could only return to the Grande Vallee once again,' as he was dying. I mean, that was what that was all about, so that was a subject of.. .You know, it was the summer my sister died - the same week - and we went to the Manet show. [in '82].. ..when I started the 'Grande Vallée'.. .And I was stuck on a subject, and I thought, 'This is very true and very simple,' and I thought, 'Shit, I'll paint the Grande Vallée for her.' And now, I got her to tell me about it, and it was green and blue, and it was just a vast sort of territory outside Nantes [in Brittany, France]. And so that's how I got started on that whole series."

"I'm not so sure I could have done otherwise, but I wish I.. .I'm re-going to a French shrink now, and she's helped me a lot. I wish I'd gone sooner, because I think women are inclined more than men to be self-destructive, and I really think I had the masochistic medal there for a while, and I, you know, I want to, that I wish I had stopped. I think it's also very masochistic to sit and cry in my spilt Scotch for areas in my life that have been very creepy and that I should have cut, left sooner. So what's, that's, I feel sorry about that. But I'm getting to [me, be] perhaps more, oh, I don't know, trying to look at that in a more positive way. Maybe I got something out of that too, I don't know.. .Maybe. I mean.. .I feel also uncomfortable about staying in France, but then, if I could only make sort of a.., instead of saying negative, 'I'm too lazy to move,' a positive thing, 'I really like this house. I really like this view. I really like Paris better than New York' - or not better, or equally, or differently, or something, which is quite true - instead of sitting - which I can do, I used to do - and missing the country and missing New York, or missing France."

"I'm not religious or anything like that. [But] a little more spiritual something or other.. .A little more 'feeling'. And there's my word again. You know?.. .And I find that.. ..[pauses], I find that uninspiring, and if I hung around too much I might find it very deadly. If I let it enter my studio. And it would be hard not to have it enter."

"I've always been told that I was a painter's painter.. .What does that mean?.. .That painters like my painting and the big wide world overlooks it, I suppose?.. .Well, I know.. .To me, it would have meant that - this is pre this new rage in buying and selling paintings - that, I think, that the formal values, like light, space, color, all those things that a painting is made up of, as well as the Jacob going up the ladder or Venus on the half shell or something [chuckles] would be what interested the painter. And perhaps the public would want the picture of the Christ child, so to speak. You know what I mean."

"Well, I once wrote in - it's in Joan Mitchell Paints a Picture, as I remember, Irving Sandler, a long time ago, that I hated the word 'Nature' with a capital 'N.'.. .But now I accept it, I suppose. I mean, I really like trees and flowers and dogs and all that much more than.. ..a lot of other people [do].. .You know, I really do get pleasure out of.. .Great pleasure. Out of just looking at.. .But I have fun here [New York] too, you know."

"I might get an idea [for the start of a painting] sitting looking at the river, or something, or a specific.. ..Yeess. I'm sure, yes, I'm sure it [the environment] influences me in terms of green and gray and color and.. .I mean, New York light is so different, and it always hits me when I come here [in New York], and it excites me to see great extremes of dark and light and no nuance - which I love. But there the Isle de France [round about Paris] has that, you know, filtered light that is that.. where even on a gray day, the green is very green, and the red is very red.. ..I think walking out barefoot and moving the paintings, being able to move them out of my studio [in Vetheuil] for transportation, things like that have had [influence].. .As well as the landscape. Lake Michigan was pretty important, you know."

"I started in, got it [former Monet's house, where he lived 1878 - 1881 in Vetheuil; [Mitchell bought the house and used it mainly first in the weekends] in summer of 67, Yeah, well, and then I started.. .I was still painting at Fremicourt and I remember starting the 'Sunflowers' [series, c. 1969-72], which I saw in Vetheuil and painted them in Fremicourt, you see.. .The thing about [the studio in] Fremicourt, also about St. Marks: I had to roll [large] paintings to get them out, which was a real drag, because of thickness [of the paint which cracked]. And when I started painting in Vetheuil, you can just take the [stretched] paintings out [in open air]. Well, that really changed unconsciously an awful lot of.. .Walk them out stretched, it's great."

"[being a woman in the Artists Club, there were] Elaine Elaine de Kooning, Mercedes Matter.. .Well May Rosenberg, but she wasn't a painter. Jane Freilicher. Nell Blaine.. .Well, there were Grace [ Grace Hartigan ] and Helen [ Helen Frankenthaler ], of course.. .How did I feel, like how? I felt, you know, when I was discouraged I wondered if really women couldn't paint, the way all the men said they [the women] couldn't paint. But then at other times I said, 'Fuck them,' you know. But I think the women were, some of them, more down on women than the men.. .I adulated the men so much they sort of liked me. I mean, I thought Bill [ Willem deKooning ] was a great painter. They liked me.. .Hans Hofmann was very supportive -of me. I used to run into him in the park. I'd be dog-walking at nine in the morning, he'd say, 'Mitchell, you should be painting.' Very nice. [both chuckle] I don't think women in any way were a threat to these men, so they could encourage the 'lady painter.'"

"And the first studio I went to [in New York, c. 1950].. .I was trying to find de Kooning because he had a painting at the Whitney, which was in the old Studio School [Eighth Street], you know.. .And I thought I would like to know him. I really dug his painting, and I dug Gorky's painting.. .But the first studio I went into was Franz Kline.. .and there were all these Klines, unstretched, hanging on the brick walls. Beautiful. You know, with the telephone book drawings all over the floor, and Kline yakking away, and it was just, I was out of my mind! And so from then on I got involved in the Artists Club. They allowed very few women in, and I was included for $35 a year. And I got very involved in the Cedar Bar and the whole thing.."

"Oh, early Kandinsky.. [stuck her early] .Well no, they had that at the Art Institute in Chicago, don't forget. See, everybody, to do 'modern art' then [New York, mid-forties], seemed to me, when you were going 'modern' [both chuckle], it was Picasso. I mean, everybody. But I avoided that like the plague. I thought.. .I loved Picasso, but it just wasn't for me.. .Well, I don't! I have some of those [early] paintings from LeLavandou - they're in storage - and from Mexico. They were Expressionist landscapes, or boats on the beach or something like that, which I still do. Sort of going abstract, going towards.."

"And then the spring of [19]'48 I toddled off to Paris on a Liberty ship.. .Yes, and arriving in Le Havre on that Liberty ship and seeing all those—the sun was coming up—and seeing all those ships sunk.. It was hardly.. .I mean, war, war, war, war... .I went to Paris, and I stayed with Zuka and Louis [Mitelberg] [her husband then, the cartoonist 'Tim']. And I looked for a place—and found it on Rue Gallande. Across the river was Notre Dame. That was all of four dollars a month, with a hole on the stairs as a toilet and a spigot with cold water and one light-bulb. That was all the electricity there was. But this view, I mean, God!.. .Saint Julien le Pauvre [Greek Orthodox Church, oldest in Paris] was right in front of me. And so I painted there."

"And I came [to New York, 1945].. .It was just after the war and I thought it was a little early to get over there [to Europe]. So I spent the winter under the Brooklyn Bridge, on the Brooklyn side, living with Barney Rosset, and I came here [to New York] to study with Hofmann.. .And I went to Hofmann's class and I couldn't understand a word he said so I left, terrified. But he and I became friends later on. Friends, but I never studied with him.."

"It is quite a narrow studio [1970s], I can never see a big four-panel [panels she was working on the same time as parts of one tryptich] all at once.. ..I can see two big panels. That’s about all.. .I had an awful lot going on at once, going back and forth. I turn [canvases] to a wall (when I am not working on them). I cant paint with everything showing."

"Pop Art, Op Art, Flop Art and Slop Art.. .I fall into the last two categories [her remark, in the mid 1970’s] ."

"Light is something very special. It has nothing to do with white. Either you see it or you don't. [George] de la Tour doesn't have light; Monet hasn't any light. Matisse, Goya, Chardin, Van Gogh, Sam Francis, Kline have it. But it has nothing to do with being the best painter at all."