Photo by KV.
Artist statement
“The feints and dodges of many abstract expressionists are well documented in the proceedings of the Club, and in numerous memoirs. The idea was to have no part of the dogmas that had nourished the modern tradition. Rhetoric, verbal or visual, was suspect; for where there is none, there is no school, and if there is no school, there are no limits. Their rhetoric was that of no rhetoric, and no one exemplifies this better than [Willem] de Kooning, who has shifted his ground and contradicted himself publicly with the deliberate intention of throwing off the rhetoricians. As [Edwin] Denby says about de Kooning’s attitude toward theory: ‘He grasped the active part and threw away the rest.’”-
from The New York School, A Cultural Reckoning (University of California Press, 1972), by Dore Ashton, pg. 4.