TW:
De Kooning is recording so much information that it's difficult to put into patterns--patterns that become memorable.
BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE MUSEUM + ARTS CENTER * June 17-September 17 * Curated by Jason Andrew * With all the on-campus Happenings, geodesic-dome constructions, and proto-Beat poetry hogging the art-historical limelight, it's easy to forget that Black Mountain College was also a hotbed of painting in the 1940s and '50s, when an illustrious faculty that included Josef Albers, Robert Motherwell, Willem
de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Jack Tworkov espoused their respective approaches to abstraction.
The painting of the latter group manifested varying syntheses of and allegiances to Jackson Pollock, Willem
de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko, to name the most pervasive influences.
Expressionism and Surrealism had already converged in Abstract Expressionism, particularly Willem
de Kooning's, but Condo's integration of them produces even more absurdly (and comically) monstrous and menacing figures than
de Kooning's women.
If oil painting was invented to render the subtleties of flesh, as
de Kooning suggested, then Kossoff's flesh is more sordid than subtle, however nuanced its squalor.
Robert Rauschenberg has said of his Erased
de Kooning Drawing, 1953, that he initially erased his own drawings but "figured out that the erased drawing had to be from a real work of art" to have significance.
The nine artists he highlights--Max Weber, Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, John Graham, Willem
de Kooning, Pollock, David Smith (barely present), Roy Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns--all went through periods of imitation or quotation.
And while he was a virtuoso paint handler, he developed a far more innovative technique than, say, Willem
de Kooning. Since no one, except perhaps Greenberg, saw Louis at work in his studio, and since he--like his near contemporaries Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski--has had no influential followers, his style of paint manipulation has remained exotic.
Arnason writes that Soutine "is closer than any artist of the early twentieth century to the Abstract Expressionists, especially
de Kooning" and employs a "seemingly uncontrolled but immensely descriptive brush gesture." Tuchman doesn't quote Arnason's comment, but does cite Willem
de Kooning's observation that there is "a certain fleshiness in his work," bringing to mind
de Kooning's remark that oil painting was invented to articulate flesh, and reminding us that artists invariably see other artists through the lens of their own interests.
Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine
de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art By Mary Gabriel New York, NY; Little Brown and Company, 2018, 944 pages, $35.00, hardcover
When an art dealer spent $15,000 (e1/412,350) on a bundle of unseen art held in a New Jersey storage locker, he never expected to find potential multi-million dollar works by the likes of abstract master Willem
de Kooning.New York gallery owner David Killen believes he has uncovered six paintings by Dutch-American abstract master Willem
de Kooning, which -- if verified -- could be worth tens of millions of dollars.
The proposed three-story addition will be composed of slumped, reflective glazing that's curved form references the organic qualities of the art work of
de Kooning and his contemporaries.
de Kooning - United States painter (born in the Netherlands) who was a leading American exponent of abstract expressionism (1904-1997)