Willem de Kooning and the Guggenheim Foundation

I remember 22 years ago, Bill (de Kooning) was invited to fill out an application by the Guggenheim Foundation. He was sent a form with an accompanying note saying that they had asked Meyer Shapiro to recommend some avant-garde artists because none of them seemed to be applying. Up until then, Bill had assumed it would be a waste of time to apply, but now he thought: Aha, so that's the way they do it, and he filled out the application, and they promptly turned him down.

He was furious because he had put himself in a position of being rejected. In fact he was furious even before he got rejected when he realized he had to bother a lot of busy people for recommendations and then fill out those dreary , endless forms.-particularly because he had nothing to fill in, no list of one-man shows, no museum collections, no well-known private collections, no teaching posts, nothing.

For the required statement of aim, he couldn't think of anything to put down but, "I want to paint and I'll continue to paint whether I get this grant or not." He ended his request rather pertinently, I thought, by writing, "And by the way, I'm the one that should be asking the questions."

-Elaine de Kooning

©willem de kooning-Excavation, 1950