“I prefer the term New York school by the way, because I think that appellation doesn't seem actual to me. It seems like a coined phrase. As a matter of fact, I don't remember in any of the get-togethers I had with the painters of that period, the names of which you probably know that that word was ever used or exchanged. I mean, nobody ever said you so-and-so abstract expressionist you!

“I mean it would be like--I don't think that Picasso and Braque set about making cubist paintings, you know, any more than they--well, imagine a primitive painter, imagine Henri Rousseau saying that he was going to make a primitive painting. He thought he was like--he said to Picasso--you know that famous thing he said? "You represent the Egyptian school and I represent the realistic school". And it's right. It's absolutely correct. Picasso is a kind of Egyptian painter.

“There was something going on of course, and every painter was different. I think it happened to be a geographical thing. I happened to be there. I don't know if I hadn't been there, I don't know what I would've done.

“I think what made a kind of, not a unity, but a kind of a group roughly that met in each other's studios or in bars was a kind of dissatisfaction with what had been going on previously, or what each of us had been doing previously. It’s as if you didn't know what you wanted to do, but you knew what you didn't want to do. It's very important to know what you don't want to do. I mean, negatives can be very positive, very important. And there was also a sense of the time it was, and so on a sense of embarking on something of which you didn't know the outcome at all. It is not like now.

On Abstract Expressionism

Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts, 1966

Talk with Audio by Philip Guston