On Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X:

I’ve always thought that this was one of the greatest paintings in the world and I’ve had a crush on it.

‘I think it is one of the greatest portraits that have [sic] ever been made, and I became obsessed with it.

[…] Velázquez was in some ways the most miraculous painter, and he was able to come so near to almost, you could say, illustration, yet with strange and subtle deformations turn these very human and personal things into great images.

About Michelangelo:

For me he is one of the very greatest draughtsmen, if not the greatest. Michelangelo made the most voluptuous male nudes in the plastic arts.

All of Picasso. The man is fascinating. And his work is prolific, unpredictable. His sculptures, his drawings. Without him, I think I would have never used a paintbrush.

I think that probably the best human cry ever painted was by Poussin […] I went a great deal to Chantilly and I remember this picture always made a terrific impression on me.

I have always loved Giacometti’s portraits, particularly those done in pencil or charcoal . . . Of everything that he’s done, I much prefer his drawings to his sculpture . . . I think people have failed to appreciate his drawings for a long time and, in my opinion, they’re the strongest things he’s done.

About Henri Michaux:

I don’t think it’s abstract…I think that he has made the best tachiste of free marks that have been made. I think he is much better in that way, in making free marks, than Jackson Pollock.

It’s really the portraits of Rembrandt that I like.

Van Gogh got very near to the violence of life itself. It’s true to say that when he painted a field he was able to give you the violence of grass.

When I talked about the brutality of fact in Picasso, I meant that Picasso in a curious way was able to put it across more directly and with less expressionism in it. It seemed to be the fact itself without the will to express.

I think Duchamp deliberately tried to create what is called a myth of our time.

Rauschenberg is an artist who is always very, very inventive to me, and I find his works very, very interesting always.