Dissecting de Kooning at the MoMA
Is it better to burn out, as Neil Young sang, than to fade away? When it came to the drama of the Abstract expressionists, Jackson Pollock burned out like a supernova in a fatal drunken driving accident while Willem de Kooning’s light faded away slowly into the long night of Alzheimer's disease. In de Kooning: A Retrospective, which runs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City through January 9, 2012, the artist returns to his rightful spotlight in an amazing exhibition featuring 200 works ranging across seven decades of work—both before and beyond the AbEx years. Organized by John Elderfield, the MoMA’s Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture, this retrospective dissects every aspect of de Kooning and detaches him from the label of Abstract Expressionist to free us to see de Kooning as the truly versatile and vast artist he was. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Dissecting de Kooning at the MoMA."
[Many thanks to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for providing me with the image above, press materials, and a review copy of the catalog to de Kooning: A Retrospective, which runs through January 9, 2012.]
[Image: Willem de Kooning (American, born the Netherlands. 1904-1997). Seated Woman on a Bench, 1972. Bronze. 37 3/4 x 36 x 34 3/8" (95.9 x 91.4 x 87.3 cm). Private collection. © 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.]