Word: painterly
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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...
...Excavation and Attic were perhaps the greatest paintings of de Kooning's long career, the best known are certainly the Women. De Kooning has always been obsessed, as a painter, with the bodies of women, quoting them in whole and in detail, with a unique mingling of distance, intimacy, lust, humor and spite. In them, the billowy amplitude of Rubens' flesh is sometimes reborn, along with the sardonic affection Reginald Marsh felt for his Coney Island cuties. But the women of the early '50s are his canonical ones-part archaic Ishtar, part Amsterdam hooker and part Marilyn...
...need groups. He became a surrealist because surrealism needed him; it had plenty of poets but no great formal artist (as distinct from vivid dream illustrators like Dali or Magritte). Even allowing for the recent rise in the critical fortunes of André Masson, the painter who introduced Miró to the surrealist group, it still seems clear that, as a draftsman and colorist, as an inventor of epigrammatic shapes set in exquisitely pure pictorial fields, Miró had no rival within that movement...