Word: de
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This early background helps explain the irrepressible fondness for popular culture--cigarette ads, Marilyns and so forth--that kept surfacing in his work in the 1950s, to the annoyance of some American critics. De Kooning was never a "pure" artist, partly because he was not trained to be one. But that was what enabled him to connect with America in a way few avant-garde painters had. He loved the lushness, the grittiness, the obtrusive weirdness of American cultural vernaculars. Though by the end of the '50s, laden with celebrity, he had become the man for younger artists to beat...
...builds on earlier art, de Kooning's no less than most. Part of its strength was in its rootedness. The big senior influences on his early American work were Ingres, Miro and Picasso--and among his contemporaries, the tragically fated Gorky, who would kill himself in 1948. "I am glad that it is about impossible to get away from his powerful influence," de Kooning wrote soon af-ter Gorky's death, and the Armenian painter's recurved, taut line, describing edge and implying volume in a single gesture, was preserved in the Dutchman's work. In fact, de Kooning...
...De Kooning, however, was inherently a corporeal artist. His best work had a wonderful libidinousness, a way of using the body of paint to access and encompass the body of the world. To call it abstract, even when it was most so, is to ignore this. In what was probably his finest painting, Excavation, 1950, one sees desire at full stretch: every form carries its physical freight--elbow, groin, folded belly, thigh, slipping and jostling in the paint as though mud wrestling in pigment. De Kooning could find metaphors of energy that none of his contemporaries could rival. And when...
...would be hard to pretend that de Kooning's output in the '60s and '70s, after he moved to East Hampton, on Long Island, measured up to the qualities of this earlier work, although his reputation by then had grown to near mythic proportions. (So did his prices: in 1989, just before the great art-market bubble burst, $20.1 million was paid at auction for a 1955 painting, Interchange.) De Kooning was a tough bird, but no talent could have been unaffected by the scale of his alcoholic bouts, and the suds-and-mayonnaise color and scatty marking...
Still, not even they can detract from the brilliant achievements of de Kooning's earlier years. An American Picasso? Surely not. But there was no European de Kooning either...