People From Amsterdam

"Johan Cruyff, true football royalty. I don't think anyone has ever influenced the game as much as he has done."

"I always told everyone that Cruyff was my idol. I'm not being disloyal to [Real] Madrid by saying that. I believe in honesty and when you look at what Johan's like, who he is and how he played, then if you can't say he's your idol, you are not a person worthy of being a Real Madrid supporter."

"Cruyff really impressed me. I think I wasn't the only one in Europe."

"When I was a teenager my idol was the Dutch footballer Johan Cruyff. He's the only person I've ever asked for an autograph."

"The whole world knew Johan Cruijff. And through him, the whole world came to know the Netherlands and Dutch football. (...) A lot of people come to my offices but never before has everyone wanted to be photographed with a visitor as they did with him."

"We [Barça] are a unique club in the world, no one has kept their jersey intact throughout their history, yet have remained as competitive as they come. (...) We have sold this uniqueness for about six percent of our budget. I understand that we are currently losing more than we are earning. However, by selling the shirt it shows me that we are not being creative, and that we have become vulgar."

"It hurts me that Holland chose an ugly path to aim for the title."

"Sadly, they played very dirty. This ugly, vulgar, hard, hermetic, hardly eye-catching, hardly football style... If with this they got satisfaction, fine, but they lost."

"Who am I supporting? I am Dutch but I support the football that Spain is playing. Spain's style is the style of Barcelona. Spain, a replica of Barça, is the best publicity for football."

"The main problem in Britain is that there are too many competitions and too many games. There is no time to prepare properly for Europe or to introduce new ideas because there is far too much emphasis on domestic football."

"4-5-1? Never. It was always 4-3-3 for me as a player and as manager, just like [Frank] Rijkaard at Barcelona. With 4-3-3, it's much easier to make combinations going forward. With only one forward, who is he going to pass to? Who is he going to make combinations with? Football is about having the best offensive play possible. I always like to play offensive football and nobody will convince me otherwise."

"Every trainer talks about movement, about running a lot. I say don't run so much. Football is a game you play with your brain. You have to be in the right place at the right moment, not too early, not too late."

"There is no medal better than being acclaimed for your style. As a coach, my teams might have won more games if we’d played in a less adventurous way. Maybe I’d have earned a little more and the bonuses would have been bigger, but if people say that Barcelona were playing the nicest football in the world with me as coach, what more can I ask for? If you’re appearing in the World Cup final it may be the biggest occasion of your life, so why be sad and fearful? Be happy, express yourself and play. Make it special for you and for everyone watching. For the good of football, we need a team of invention, attacking ideas and style to emerge. Even if it doesn't win, it will inspire footballers of all ages everywhere. That is the greatest reward."

"You should know that I had problems at the end of my career as a player here and I don't know if you know that someone [put] a rifle at my head and tied me up and tied up my wife in front of the children at our flat in Barcelona. The children were going to school accompanied by the police. The police slept in our house for three or four months. I was going to matches with a bodyguard. All these things change your point of view towards many things. There are moments in life in which there are other values. We wanted to stop this and be a little more sensible. It was the moment to leave football and I couldn't play in the World Cup after this."

"But Appel is more an assembler than a sculptor. Although now and then he carves wood or models plaster his works are mainly assemblages. He recycles objets trouvés which appeal to him in some way or which invite reuse. An increasingly wide range of industrial leftovers is incorporated in the assemblages from the early Nineties."

"The body trained to deal with worries and with itself falls apart. A contradictory body rises from it, a will to see shows itself what can only be seen at night. Who sees then? Through the sacrificed body Black sees itself red, it listens to its vibrating tones, which the day never hears. The magnetic hand and shoulder hastily throws illuminations on the canvas. At this instant of gesture, the unknown storms, and the body breaks apart."

"The painter is the first dancer of his work. Appel understands the appeal to disturb the finished work as he is in the process of making it. He drops his canvas, his paper, puts down his brush – that is to say, he resigns himself to the deposition of the gesture, as one gives in to fatigue by taking a break. He will soon begin performing again.."

"It is painting and sculpture [of Karel Appel] at its best. It is close to the heart, animalistic, idealistic, and thoroughly experimental."

"Occasion is a good word: it speaks of an 'offered case'. The painter also lives on such plundering. Karel Appel is touched by a circumstance, and make paintings out of his feeling. Appel's work touches in turn those that encounter it, and they leap at the occasion to reflect on it. Art and thinking live on these, jostling."

"..Appel does not hesitate to expose his colour to rubbish. More than any other this work returns 'aesthetic discourse to its precariousness: how could it articulate coloured things that so clearly result from a 'gesture' and are free from any finality. It is not the gesture of the painter, it is the gesture of painting, or painting as gesture that Appel opposes to thought."

"Now you know what red does: / Red likes to walk in the green grass. / You now know what yellow knows: / The sun shines because no one's fond on dying. / As for blue: the blue sky seems black / to the kid who welcomes nothing."

"..by adding and more adding, you soon get such an accumulation of colour material that the painting eventually acquires a heavy, febrile surface. The danger is of such a thick, abundant, heavy surface seeming dull and sluggish to the eye, because in that case it would lose the mobility, which, for Appel, is the essential quality of all surfaces. Painting blinds painting, like mud and clay blocks a pool. A painting's entire choreography, caught in tension, can collapse in an instant. And it's in that instant when Appel the draughtsman gets to work, and the open play of the lines of the drawing is the right medium to blow new life into the painting."

"[Appel] is a classical painter who lives much less in the 'madding' crowd and far more in the quiet of his studios."

"[Appel] has to shatter, to infringe. It is his deployment. He is a solitary man with a staggering health. He leaves dreaming to matter."

"[Appel's painting] 'Hip, Hip, Hourra!' (1949) is one of the finest works he produced in this period. The figures stand out from the black background surface.. ..in a lively movement and colouring I would go so far as to call sumptuous.. ..'Hip, Hip, Hourra!' is as flat as a kaleidoscope. It is a coloured drawing on black, a dark box with colours stuck on like butterflies in a glass case.. ..[Fuchs compares it with a slightly later painting 'Volons ensemble']: This work is definitely not a set of figures that have settled quietly in a painting; what we have is a confusion of more or less figurative movement: a composition without quietude. In 'Volons ensemble' Appel created in 1950 the model for a structure that would be fundamental for the rest of his oeuvre."

"Born in a district of Amsterdam, from his youth the artist [Appel] came into contact, according to Peter Bellew, with the sculpture of Dutch New Guinea, a good example of which is to be found in the collection of the Colonial Museum (today the Tropenmuseum) [300 meters from his parental house]. Appel himself told Simon Vinkenoog that all his work was popular, in that it came from the people, adding that it wasn't "folk" popular, but more the kind of popular found in an industrial, incipiently consumerist society, with high waste levels, like the Amsterdam of his youth, a popularity from which neither violence nor a certain degree of chaos are exempt."

"[Karel Appel called out to 'his Night':] You, Beauty! And since I have to account for a body, I have handed this torture over to the executioner"

"Karel Appel had been deeply interested in the paintings and drawings of the mentally ill since his discovery of Dubuffet's Art brut. As he explained years later, he had had access to this type of work in Holland, Belgium and Paris. However, it was the 1950 exhibition [September 1950, exhibition of Art, inaugurated at the Centre Psychiatrique Sainte-Anne, Paris] that opened his eyes definitively and enabled him to shake off European classicism.. .[But] what I want to point up here is that, although the Sainte-Anne exhibition was crucial for his understanding of such paintings, he had already made his own excursions into 'psychopathological art'[before]."

"('My three year old daughter can do as much'.) Yes, it is true, but the difference is that I do it."

"The mill is a tool for the wind the mill is like a human being that escapes"

"The only control that I excercize [in painting] is to not throw too much paint next to the canvas."

"[Appel's paintings] assert themselves with a certain brutality that leaves little room for doubt.. .Appel exists.. .Appel's paintings exist, they are made of colour-paste. His painting is absolutely materialist."

"If I had not become a painter, I would surely have become a clown.. .. because I make people laugh.. ..Faces deformed by suffering, humour or work. Often crazy. They then became imaginary, when I adorned them with movements free colours depending on the head. The colour too become clown-like"

"In poetic creation there is no question of overcoming matter, as the idle aesthetic proclaimed by so many people would have it – but to free matter."

"Pollock.. .I also feel like an erupting volcano."

"It is a question of expressing, at base, the essence of the tree.. .What does not appear in what does appear, in short. What remains hidden, concealed, withdraws into what appears."

"Theories Are the things and neither idealism nor religions, nor histories nor slogans. The complexity of things themselves, that's what theories are.. .The thing exists without showing itself, entirely, it does nor appear, theory is the thing."

"I am afraid of a new barbarism which is killing man's freedom."

"The brushstroke, in painting, is purely and simply what it is – rhythm, color, matter."

"Violence allows Appel to lose 'nothing' of the 'whole'; to stop his painting only after all the leaps of the act have crossed it."

"Something appears midway between order and chaos, these forms, these expressions occupy a middle position."

"At the very moment when my ego is unprooted [uprooted?] and freed of intellectual activities and values, the realization of what is still unknown and uncreated, the silent 'non-form' unity emerges, appearing as childish schizophrenia. The indefinable beginning takes form"

"A war is raging within me that burns everything. So I can begin again."

"There exists an insanity that touches on a higher level, by knowledge or instinct. That insanity of life I try to put in my painting. It has nothing to do with any morals or laws. It is there and it is insane."

"Every day I have to be awake to escape.. .The whole world is sleepy. It is a real fight to be awake, to see everything new, for the first time in your life."

"All the absurdity and hope are the stimulants to create. You make art to find a little hole to go on. You go through the whole to find the world again, and the absurdity is that still, somehow it is the same.. .Hopelessness and hope are the same. It's a very thin line you don't see any more. I don't believe in that line between hopelessness and hope today."

"Theories / are things.. .Absence and nonexistence / of theories are things."

"Knowledge isolates phenomena and things to observe with.. ..nothing is isolatable or can be removed from its environment. Anything which becomes isolated ceases to exist. It is like the violent refusal of someone to play a game in which everyone cheats."

"[artists are people] who employ matter between birth and death. Matter is something to use, not possess."

"The experience of the moment is what's important, and somehow the image, the 'thing' is left over."