Word: painterly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Perhaps it is not in the holiday spirit to feel that this oeuvre has any faults or limitations at all. But it does; what serious painter's does not? Their nature can be assessed by comparing the "early" with the "late" de Kooning. When the slight, pale Dutch youth smuggled himself into America without proper papers in 1926, he brought with him something that very few of his colleagues in the New York School of the '40s and '50s would turn out to have: a thorough, guild-based art training that centered on formal drawing...
...women, rising in sublime lunar complacency from their Empire decolletages or, naked, from the Turkish tiles, had much to do with de Kooning's syntax then.) The result was that the very paintings that secured de Kooning's reputation as a key figure in abstract expressionism, a painter hardly less "radical" than Pollock, were grounded in classical prototype and practice: if his paintings of the decade 1945-55 looked a mile forward, they also looked two miles back. Their inherent structure had nothing to do with German or any other kind of modernist expressionism. It was closer...
They seem packed with elbows, thighs and groins, but these images-which, in the hands of a mere surrealist-minded painter, could have turned the surface into a charnel house-are sublimated by de Kooning's classical instincts to a generalized sense of the body that matches, in a terse way, the muscular rakings of his brush...
AILING. Joan Miró, 90, protean Spanish painter of playful, dreamlike canvases; gravely ill with deteriorating respiratory disease; in Palma de Mallorca...
...foreign painter alive today is more genuinely popular in America than Hockney. Certainly none has achieved such popularity with less compromise in the essential quality of his work. That work has its ups and downs, like any other oeuvre, but one would need a flint heart and a glass eye to resent Hockney's success. The bleached-blond thatch, the square face like that of a cubified owl, the schoolboy spectacles, the togs (blazers, cricket caps, candy-striped odd socks) that suggest the house captain of some imaginary...