"My interest in desperation lies only in that sometimes I find myself having become desperate. Very seldom do I start out that way. I can see of course that, in the abstract, thinking and all activity is rather desperate"
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Desperation, for de Kooning, isn’t a brand or a pose; it’s a weather system you notice after you’re already drenched. That distinction matters because Abstract Expressionism has been mythologized as a genre of heroic anguish, the painter as tortured conduit. De Kooning undercuts that romance. He “very seldom” begins in desperation, which quietly reframes artmaking as process rather than prophecy: you start with work, materials, appetite, curiosity, and only later discover you’ve wandered into a psychological cul-de-sac.
The line’s slyest move is the pivot from the personal to “the abstract.” He admits the grand claim almost grudgingly, as if he’s catching himself saying something philosophical. Thinking itself is “rather desperate” because it’s an act performed in the dark: you make marks or decisions without guarantees, trying to force coherence out of incomplete information. That’s a studio ethic disguised as existential observation. In painting, every stroke is a wager that can’t be fully justified ahead of time; you only know what it was by what it does next. Desperation becomes less an emotion than a structural condition of making.
Contextually, this fits de Kooning’s refusal to be pinned down - figurative, abstract, neither obedient to theory nor allergic to it. His work courts risk, revision, even failure, and the quote gives you the psychology behind that: not melodrama, but exposure. The subtext is a kind of tough modesty. If there’s despair here, it’s democratic: not reserved for artists, but embedded in the basic act of trying.
The line’s slyest move is the pivot from the personal to “the abstract.” He admits the grand claim almost grudgingly, as if he’s catching himself saying something philosophical. Thinking itself is “rather desperate” because it’s an act performed in the dark: you make marks or decisions without guarantees, trying to force coherence out of incomplete information. That’s a studio ethic disguised as existential observation. In painting, every stroke is a wager that can’t be fully justified ahead of time; you only know what it was by what it does next. Desperation becomes less an emotion than a structural condition of making.
Contextually, this fits de Kooning’s refusal to be pinned down - figurative, abstract, neither obedient to theory nor allergic to it. His work courts risk, revision, even failure, and the quote gives you the psychology behind that: not melodrama, but exposure. The subtext is a kind of tough modesty. If there’s despair here, it’s democratic: not reserved for artists, but embedded in the basic act of trying.
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