Word: paint
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Kooning's characteristically hooked, recurving line takes on an invigorating speed, charging and skidding through the dense paint, slits open with the promise of spatial depth, only to shut again. The only relief from the close churning of forms is a curious "window" at the middle of the painting -- red, white and blue -- that looks like a blurred American flag. The work's space is not deep, as the title might suggest, but shallow, like a bas-relief. You keep expecting the image to fly apart into formal incoherence, but it never does: it has the kind of control...
...White House began to take on its historic designs; the place shone with new paint and gardens. She was ecstatic to find the original woodcuts for wallpaper ordered in the early days. New panels were printed. She relished the great view down toward the Mall from the Truman balcony. "This is what it is all about," she told a visitor, sweeping her arm from the Washington Monument to the Jefferson Memorial. "This is what these men fight so hard...
...Kooning is probably the most libidinal painter America has ever had. One sees him as the consummate anti-Duchamp, a permanent relief from over- theorized art, a man so in touch with the sources of his pictorial pleasure (the body of paint and the body of the world) that he can render you dizzy with exhilaration. This isn't dumbness but a particular form of sensory intelligence that has always been rare in American art and came, in this case, from outside it. De Kooning arrived in the U.S. as an illegal immigrant from Rotterdam...
...were forced to pick the best single picture De Kooning ever painted, it would probably have to be Excavation, 1950: that tangled, not-quite monochrome, dirty-cream image of -- what? Bodies is the short answer: every one of the countless forms that seem embedded in the paint, jostling and slipping against one another in a tempo that seems to get faster toward the corners, can be read as an elbow, a thigh, a buttock, but never quite literally. There is even a set of floating teeth -- the dentures the Women would soon be sporting...
...legacy were not in New York but in California: Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud.) Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns reacted against him, sons against the parent; but Rauschenberg's now classic Oedipal gesture of rubbing out a De Kooning drawing could not erase the obvious fact that the paint in his combine-pictures came straight out of the older Dutch master, drips, clots...