From de Kooning: An American Master by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, after meeting Arshile Gorky:

“(de Kooning) would talk about even the oldest art as if it were made yesterday. From the academy in Rotterdam, de Kooning had gained an impression of hte history of art as forbidding, an imposing edifice to whihc one might aspire after many years of humble apprenticeship. At the same time, he was taught that to be modern meant to reject the past. Gorky did not share these views. Art belonged not to hisotry, Gorky thought, but to the present. What de Kooning found liberating was that Gorky treated past art as if it were alive and speaking to modern artists as if it were '“news that stays news,” in Ezra Pound’s famous formulation. Gorky understood that the challenge for Americans—especially immigrants shorn of their countries—was to acquire the authority of a great tradition and not retreat into provincial ideas like nationalism and social justice or succumb to mere novelty.”