People From Amsterdam

"The wastelands belong to my youth [c. 1930's]. When I was young I played in the outskirts of the city - watching the cranes at the harbour. There was no law but garbage, grass and wildflowers like boys and girls, rough, hot and sexual and full of hidden pleasures. Life and death are overlapping in the wastelands like in my paintings."

"You can see the roughness of structure and the spots like wounds from battles on the canvas. The tops of skyscrapers with windows like eyes constantly remind you that there are laws surrounding the wastelands, and so you hide in the deep grass when you make love to a girl in dirty clothes, and experience how your nerves of seeing become stronger and stronger and every little sound more and more intense. That's what Pasolini's poetry is partly about; he was a street guy and therefore I avoided beautiful new wood or metal for his sculpture.. .The wasteland was Pasolini's other side; the boys, the knives, the nights, the tensions."

"I'm not a pessimist. Maybe I don't have a primitive feeling of happiness, that is true. Sometimes my color is happy but not the expression."

"Our civilization is in a continuous state of self-repair. Maybe you have undergone surgery once. In former times you might have died. Today everybody can live on and on; everything around us is repaired, even the spirit. Look at the young artists. They only paint the facade and not the things hidden behind it. I don't say that life is lost its originality. I show straightforwardly the state of repair of civilization."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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"

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

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

"[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]."

"[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."

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

"If the stroke of the brush is so important, it is because it expresses precisely what is not there."

"The true artist has no style. Style is an exterior decorative element. The true artist as servant of his matter, transcends it with an absolute freedom."

"a sky of clouds completely 'out of the blue'.. .I'm looking, reflecting, and when it suddenly happens: hey, the clouds, and what clouds! [in interview with , c. 1988]"

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"My brush-strokes start in nothing and they end in nothing, and in-between you find the image."

"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"

"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."

"[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."

"You can forget facts but you cannot forget understanding."

"I am impressed by the great limitations of the human mind. How quick are we to learn, that is, to imitate what others have done or thought before. And how slow to understand, that is, to see the deeper connections. Slowest of all, however, are we in inventing new connections or even in applying old ideas in a new field."

"Once I even took the train to Utrecht, forty miles from Amsterdam, with my yellow star, this star which I still have. Why did I go? I just wanted to visit some friends. I was a little bit crazy, a little bit insane"

"To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery."

"I spent every night until four in the morning on my dissertation, until I came to the point when I could not write another word, not even the next letter."

"One of the things I learned, one of the strangest things, is how to think."

"For several months I was incapable of feeling anything, completely inaccessible to my feelings — I did not laugh, I did not cry. The second thing was this amazing trauma, where I forgot the names of everyone I knew. That was very strange. I knew who everyone was: this was a friend from high school, this was my cousin, but I had to relearn every name. It was quite striking, that very strong reaction that I had. They have a name for it, I think: posttraumatic stress syndrome. I don't sit here conquering great resistance to talk. It is not my way. I don't suffer the reliving of these memories with tremendous pain. It's very odd, but it's finished for me. That, of course, is never quite true. It isn't finished. I am like all of my generation; we are marked people. But I don't suffer; I can talk to you about it. Most of my family was killed. All of my father's and mother's sisters and brothers and their children, my sister and my old grandfather, they're all gone. Four out of five Jews in Holland never came back after the war — 80 percent."

"The rule of the game was never assume that anybody, however honorable, would be able to stand up under torture. If Mr. X, who knew where I was, was caught for some reason, I should move."

"I knew all the time I was going to get through the war. It was completely irrational, a silly idea, but I was not going to lie down and get myself killed. I was going to get out of it."

"One of the absolute rules I learned in the war was, don't know anything you don't need to know, because if you ever get caught they will get it out of you."

"I was lucky because the same week that I went to prison the Americans crossed the Rhine and cut off the northern part of Holland, so there was no longer any possibility of being shipped out to a concentration camp. The rail lines were cut. So I was in prison in Amsterdam during the very last days of the war. We were sent to the men's prison and the girls were sent to a women's prison in a different place."

"I lived altogether in nine different places while in hiding, because whenever something happened, either someone betrayed the place or something happened to someone who knew where I was, I had to move. The rule of the game was never assume that anybody, however honorable, would be able to stand up under torture. If Mr. X, who knew where I was, was caught for some reason, I should move."

"Deliberately or not, every author is of course present in every book he or she writes — even in a scientific text."