Wit & Attitude Quote by Maurice de Vlaminck

Vlaminck’s bravado lands like a paint-splattered door slam: the minute the materials are in reach, reverence becomes a distraction. He’s not arguing that art history is worthless; he’s describing the psychological violence required to make anything that feels alive. “I don’t give a damn” is a studio discipline, a self-imposed deafness to the chorus of “already done” and “done better.” For an artist linked to Fauvism’s color riots, the line is also a defense of sensation over scholarship: the hand and the eye have to outrun the museum.

The subtext is competitive and anxious. “Other people’s painting” isn’t just peers; it’s the entire inheritance of European painting pressing down like a velvet curtain. To paint under that weight is to risk becoming a tasteful footnote. Vlaminck’s solution is a kind of productive amnesia: you can study influences, but in the moment of making, influence must be metabolized or it will paralyze you.

“Every generation must start again afresh” sounds naive until you read it as a critique of cultural gatekeeping. Modernism sold itself as rupture, but Vlaminck frames rupture as necessity, not fashion. The world changes; perception changes; the old visual language starts lying. Starting “afresh” is less about pretending nothing came before than about refusing to let yesterday’s solutions dictate today’s problems. It’s an ethic of risk: if you’re not willing to look ignorant, you’ll end up looking merely informed.