"De Kooning's art testifies to a refusal to be either recruited or pushed aside. His expansion of the resources of painting as a means by which the sensibility can interact with chance, impulse, the given, and the unknown, presupposes that the individual as he is will continue to oppose himself and all systems. If ideology is the ghost that haunts post-war painting, de Kooning haunts the ghost. He is the nuisance of the individual 'I am' in an age of collective credos and styles." -Harold Rosenberg