{"id":607,"date":"2011-10-11T16:19:58","date_gmt":"2011-10-11T16:19:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=607"},"modified":"2011-10-12T11:08:05","modified_gmt":"2011-10-12T11:08:05","slug":"the-heart-of-abstract-expressionism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=607","title":{"rendered":"The Heart of Abstract Expressionism"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Pirate (Untitled II)<\/p><\/div>\n

De Kooning is the most demanding of all the abstract expressionists. In a way that isn\u2019t the case with Pollock or Rothko or Still or Motherwell\u2014insert name here\u2014de Kooning\u2019s work always seems a bit confrontational. It\u2019s as if someone who doesn\u2019t have your best interests in mind (or maybe just doesn\u2019t care that you\u2019re there) has entered the room, and it might be best to keep an eye on him. This is a natural human reaction to an unpredictable presence, and de Kooning was never predictable. His work never settles down and behaves. You could forge a Rothko or Pollock or Motherwell without too much guesswork, really: their brilliance was in their invention of their own recognizable style, with a set of personal rules one can extrapolate pretty reliably from any of their great paintings. From then on, they worked out the consequences of their particular niche, with great consistency. It\u2019s hard to imagine de Kooning had any sense of his own style, as such, nor did he seem to care much about how one of his paintings would look in the end. Once he began a painting, his only concern seemed to be to leave behind something that doesn\u2019t just sit there\u2014to reach the point where he could finally quit working on a canvas, stand back, and say, OK. It\u2019s doing things on its own now. Let\u2019s move on<\/em>. It was all visceral, muscular, hand-eye, with the intellect in sleep mode: as Susan Sontag quotes him in an epigraph: Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It’s very tiny–very tiny, content.<\/em> It would have been more honest to say, Content? There isn’t any. It’s all about the paint.<\/em><\/p>\n

The big retrospective of de Kooning\u2019s work at MoMA offers an opportunity to see how his work represents the essence of abstract expressionism, the heart of the movement, and you can see echoes of his continuous risk-taking and discovery more in the next generation, in Frankenthaler and Sam Francis, for example, than in the work of anybody in de Kooning\u2019s crew. (It also happens to demonstrate, once again, that abstract expressionism originated with Gorky. You can see how clearly De Kooning pretty much impersonated Gorky for a while, as Pollock also did, before he became himself.) I began to warm up to de Kooning when I could see his paintings not as the conclusion of a plan, but as an artifact left behind by his endless attempts to discover a way forward after making an initial mark. His genius was that he never quite figured this out, once and for all, never really developed a technique or method for building the tensions that seem to hold his images together: every canvas was a fresh start, a new plunge into the unknown. Everything he did still seems risky. As a result, his work has a tactless quality\u2014as if each painting is too self-absorbed to at least glance at itself in a mirror once or twice before heading to the gallery. The point wasn\u2019t to please, but to instigate something that had a life of its own, regardless of how it all looked in the end. Many of his paintings happen to be dazzling, but in de Kooning\u2019s case, it wasn\u2019t by design. That just wasn’t the point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

De Kooning is the most demanding of all the abstract expressionists. In a way that isn\u2019t the case with Pollock or Rothko or Still or Motherwell\u2014insert name here\u2014de Kooning\u2019s work always seems a bit confrontational. It\u2019s as if someone who doesn\u2019t have your best interests in mind (or maybe just doesn\u2019t care that you\u2019re there) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Heart of Abstract Expressionism - represent<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=607\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Heart of Abstract Expressionism - represent\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"De Kooning is the most demanding of all the abstract expressionists. 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