One of the joys of covering a Willem de Kooning exhibition, such as the one at the Bridgestone Museum of Art, is catching up with the jargon that surrounds his work. As he was a leading light of New York¡¯s postwar abstract expressionist movement, who later veered in the direction of figurative art, de Kooning¡¯s paintings are typified by a wilful rejection of modulated technique, which can evoke comparisons to kindergarten art. It is then amusing to read something like this, from the exhibition catalog:
¡°His approach does not differ in any way from that of the Old Masters who were dealing with a more venerable idea of beauty. He was concerned with depicting aesthetic objects of interest to his own age with new formal principles, a basic attitude that he shared with the great artists of the past.¡±
This is rather like saying that a pomegranate and a moon rock are similar because they both exist in the same cosmos. It is even funnier when you see the artwork that this passage actually refers to, namely ¡°Study for Marilyn Monroe¡± (1951), which consists of cartoonish lines sketched on pieces of tracing paper, roughly pasted onto a larger sheet of paper, and then partially colored with blurred smudges of pastel.
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