If you were to have a retrospective, what would you show?

I would want to show everything, and that it was, for that period, a true expression of myself, what I felt deeply about.

Are a lot of modern artists going to vanish from art history?

They’re going to be reevaluated.

When you talk about art history and what survives, why does what remains remain? Have the values changed?

The underlying values in art have never changed. Because to be a fine artist, to be an artist worthy of lasting, first he has to have an identity. I mean, you know it’s Juan Gris. Or you know it’s Picasso. He has an identity. Identity is what I call being avant-garde. It’s very fresh. It’s a new experience, a new personality. It’s a new person. It’s a new painting. It can have old values, but it’s new. You look at the painting and you feel that person. Cézanne has a body of work. In each period of his life, there was an intensity and a struggle going on, a searching. There’s powerful emotion there. Later on, he refined that emotion. But when you look at the whole body of work, it’s the same guy going through the whole thing.

Why did it take you nine years to paint Memoir (1970-79)?

Memoir is a portrait of my wife originally in a closed room with a mask on the wall, which is a death mask of her father. But then the painting was not satisfying and it remained that way for eight years, or nine years. I picked it up nine years later and saw the solution: that the mask can no longer be there, and that for the memory to be completed I had to open up the windows and show the town that she came from. So the windows make the painting breathe. It gave you a space out and a space in. It made the room much more exciting because before that it was just closed up.

Can anyone relate to art? Does art relate something we all share?

Oh yes. They might not understand the finer points, why should they? If I read a great novel, or listen to a great symphony, I don’t know all that goes into it. But I certainly want to hear it over and over. It means a lot to me in my life. So a picture is the same way. It has that gut reaction. It has that emotional response. If I listen to a Beethoven, it means something special to me. Or if I listen to a more lyrical composer, it means something. I’m not a musician, but I really appreciate good music. I really can. I can appreciate good literature too, read a good book. I think there are some people who don’t know what goes into a work of art, but can appreciate it. And can distinguish too. It’s a taste. Why was I able to have an early taste for Baroque music? I wasn’t raised that way. They played nothing but sentimental junk when I was a kid. Yet when I grew older, the first thing that appealed to me was Baroque music. It’s identity. Aesthetics. It’s there. It’s within you and you don’t have to know everything about it in order to have a reaction to it. And I think that’s what happens a lot of times when people go to the Met. They look at a good Manet and they get a response. They don’t know how he painted that picture. But it’s there and they know it’s good. And they don’t have to have any museum person tell them. But as long as they can have that response.