The Nude descending the Staircase looked to me like an explosion in a shingle mill, which I thought was the right kind of reasoning to settle it for all time. But later, after the blaze of Bellows and Henri, I saw it again in the painter’s studio, thinking this time what a wonderful abstraction.
Many times my ship has almost floundered, many times the sky has been too dark to know where art was going. The 1920’s were enough to turn any creative heart into an organ without blood. Then I saw the Nude again in Hollywood. It seemed full of the sorrows of the Son of Man. It’s the Crucifixion, I thought. I have never seen it since.
(Concerning Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912)

That day we went to Colmar [...] and I saw at last the great Grünewald Altarpiece. I can’t tell you how impressed I was. [...] The Christ’s body, mutilated to a state of horror, suggested all the Nazi camps one could imagine. His body growing heavier and heavier, all human life practically gone except in John the Baptist - serene and pointing, a witness with a consciousness beyond human drama, a vision undisturbed which knows the light-dark spinning of the earth, and human drama is only a covering for the truth which is deathless.

I keep very much to myself. I hate the avantgarde-stuff, except for Mark Rothko, but he makes things so big and just color and space. The Pollock show (at Janis) was awful as far as I am concerned. [...] I feel and want to be left alone. I have my own dreams. (March 1954)

I am no more a Northwest painter than a cat.

I have been influenced by the Baha'i religion which believes there has been but one religion which renews itself under different names. The root of all religions, from the Baha'i point of view, is based on the theory that man will gradually come to understand the unity of the world and the oneness of mankind. It teaches that all the prophets are one - that science and religion are the two great powers which must be balanced if man is to become mature. I feel my work has been influenced by these beliefs. I’ve tried to decentralize and interpenetrate so that all parts of a painting are of related value. Perhaps I‘ve hoped even to penetrate perspective and bring the far near.