nd knowing and getting under the skin.” Willem de Kooning, 93, was the last survivor of his famous peers. One would not have predicted for him a great old age. Among the leading figures of hard-living generation he belonged by temperament and talent to a romantic tradition of artists who burned the physical and psychic fuel of themselves with devastating speed and completeness. Few of de Kooning’s closest friends and colleagues survived the harshness of the 1940s and 1950s. In 1948, Arshile Gorky, De Kooning’s mentor for his studio on the eastern end of Long Island, committed suicide at 48. In 1956, Jackson Pollock at the age of 44, killed himself in a drunken roadside collision.
In 1962, Franz Kline gave himself away to a heart attack at 52. Three years later David Smith died in a car crash at 59 and in 1970 Mark Rothko, slit his wrists while battling ever-deepening alcoholic depression. Willem de Kooning was the principal member of the Abstract Expressionism. Abstract Expressionism gave birth as a reaction to years of struggle against conservative taste, improvised circumstances and reinforced by confused feelings created after World War II. De Kooning was celebrated for his ferocious Women painting in 1950s.
In 1956, he took a break form Women theme, and started to paint small, packed shapes with a feel for city. Woman merged into an urban landscape filled with small, interchangeable parts of the metropolitan environment. In 1963, he began a new series of Women. He painted women on tall door panels. De Kooning’s art was of mutually exclusive contradictions without the resolution of synthesis, of harmony and balance. By the end of 1970s, he had reached a point of near total spiritual exhaustion- partly due to heavy drinking and partly for a tendency to forgetfulness and a gradual detachment from the world around him.
Much was said of Kooning about his last drawings, ” as a doodling of a helpless old man,” but the reality was quite different. De Kooning succumbed to Alzheimer disease in late 1970s. According to Peter Schjedahl, in his essay, De Kooning later life was compared to King Lear in Shakespeare’s play. It is said of him , ” The wonder is, he hath endures so long./ He but usurped his life.” Peter continued on with these lyrics of King Lear to praise De Kooning’s later life. Come, let’s away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i’the cage. When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too, Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out; And take upon’s the mystery of things, As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out, In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones That ebb and flow by the moon. “Willem De Kooning: The Late Paintings, The 1980s” , an exhibit in Modern Museum of San Fransisco, was the center of a critical controversy. He was labeled to be lost to Alzheimer’s disease and thought to be slipped from reality.
According to a critic in New York Daily, ” the paintings are like seeing a comic actor cast unexpectedly in a serious role.” She further stated that there was a evidence of loss of energy in those recent paintings. To be specific she picked Untitled XIII (1986). She criticized by saying, ” the quality of line dissolves from improvisational to conventional. Rather than making their own paths, lines become mere stripes, tracing the outlines of forms, already laid down on the canvas.” The critic accused the exhibit curator Gary Garrells of taking an unusual step of collecting a panel of experts to determine when De Kooning’s work began to lose coherence. The panel included painter Joseph Johns and curator Robert Storr of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
After close examination of his paintings the expert group determined that De Kooning’s work faltered after 1988. Gary Garrells declared the paintings made before 1988 as the most beautiful and sensual abstracts works of modern art. There was not mere criticis