De Kooning Retrospective: A Lifelong Battle With Drawing — SkimNews
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- The exhibition traces De Kooning's career-long tension between his Rotterdam academy training — including a charcoal still life (Dish With Jugs) estimated at 600 hours of work as a teenager — and his abstract-expressionist rebellion against those thoroughly internalized classical rules.
- De Kooning's commercial work as a sign painter and commercial illustrator after he stowed away to the US at 22 informs his later breakthrough; the show notes he didn't have a solo show until he was nearly 44.
- Excavation (1950) reads on first glance as interlocking abstract shapes but reveals screaming faces and dismembered body parts, evoking both Europe's mass graves and 'an orgiastic ecstasy of bodies dissolving into each other.'
- Woman I hangs in a separate gallery normally reserved for the museum's Dutch Golden Age treasures alongside Vermeer and Rembrandt, a placement the reviewer reads as quietly deflating the painting's mid-century reputation for 'monstrous' defaming of women.
- The black-and-white Rome works from the late 1950s feel 'slapdash and derivative of Franz Kline,' and the exhibition does not overturn conventional wisdom that De Kooning struggled to scale earlier heights in the two decades that followed.
- The show closes with a 1985 painting of sinuous blue and black lines on mottled white, made as De Kooning's cognitive decline advanced, which the reviewer calls 'serene, strange and straightforwardly beautiful' — the battle with himself finally over.
Why it matters: By pairing standout paintings with a wider selection of drawings and even hanging Woman I in the Dutch Golden Age gallery, the curators make an institutional argument that De Kooning belongs alongside Vermeer and Rembrandt — repositioning an artist long viewed as a late-period burnout as a draftsman-painter continuum whose late works deserve renewed attention.
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