Word: pollocks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...claim that artistic merit is wholly dependent upon the medium employed is about as sophisticated an analysis as saying "my kid sister could have done that" when viewing a painting by Pollock...
...artist at his best, up to his 60th year. By the time the show gets to Europe and other early works have dropped out, it will be patchier still; a pity, since the Whitney plainly wants the show to revise art history with a bang, installing de Kooning in Pollock's place as the central hero of abstract expressionism...
...catalogue, "Willem de Kooning has added to the vocabulary of painting, altered the perception of what painting represents." Jorn Merkert's catalogue essay asserts that de Kooning "played perhaps the decisive role" in the development of abstract expressionism (notwithstanding de Kooning's own generous tribute to Pollock as the one who "broke the ice"). The purpose of canonization is well in hand; once again-though one must except Curator Paul Cummings' measured and enlightening essay on de Kooning's drawings-the work of a distinguished artist becomes a pedestal for the display of swollen claims...
...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 to cubism, but with the turning...
...ones that stretched arm and eye, surfaces that rose to the challenge of scale that was embedded in abstract expressionism. But she was able to find a way of rapid gestural drawing that did not depend on the skeining and overlay of thrown paint from edge to edge that Pollock had perfected. It was the brush that counted for her, and when she did fling or dribble liquid pigment on the surface, it only looked like a mannerism. But her sense of drawing was so ingrained that she could cover a huge surface with notations that never palled: shifting tempo...