Recently I attended de Kooning: A Retrospective at the MoMA. This extensive exhibition covers seventeen thousand square feet of de Kooning’s work from seven decades. The exhibition was a long journey through exquisite sensitivity, raw emotion and misogyny; from the jewel-like, biomorphic Summer Couch to the beautifully grotesque Woman II. Also on view were works from some of my favorite series- the gestural abstractions, black and white, landscapes and of course, the women. As I moved through the exhibition, the brushwork became increasingly luscious and aggressive and it sometimes appeared that de Kooning had just walked away from the canvases. When I entered the last gallery, I was unexpectedly overwhelmed by the serenity of the late paintings. Anger and turbulence had dissolved in to subtle, delicate, undulating lines, broad expanses of white, thin, flat layers and glazes. I would like to believe that de Kooning found peace and that it was not just frailty that moved his brush in his end of life work.
