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Article: Willem De Kooning: Gagosian Gallery/Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.(Critical Essay)
- Article from:
- Artforum International
- Article date:
- September 1, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The dominant view of de Kooning's brushstrokes maintains that they were heroic masculine gestures, deposits of existential Self; I prefer to imagine that they were self- (not Self-) propelled. They have what a biologist would call motility. This is also true of the career as a whole, which was a kind of motor fueled by such self-recycling strategies as repainting, collaging, tracing, and opaque-projecting earlier work. But eventually, as demonstrated by two recent surveys celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the artist's birth, all the movement ground to a painful and ambiguous halt.
Both exhibitions proposed that we look at de Kooning's career through the ...