The golden age

Willem de Kooning, Pink Angels, 1945, Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, Los Angeles

de Kooning, a Retrospective

I don't think it gets any better than this: 200 paintings, drawings and sculptures

by Willem de Kooning  

at MOMA thru January 9th. 

Two Women with Still Life, 1952, pastel and charcoal on paper, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Organized by John Elderfield. The show is perfection. 
Here's what a few favorites have had to say on the subject:

Holland Cotter, New York Times, on de Kooning's figures:

"...By Pink Angels the figures have lost their clothes, lost their faces, and become monstrously voluptuous, approximately human forms made from chunks of cut-up flesh. It's as if we're seeing the cleanup phase of a sloppy autopsy, but on that took place inside a chamber of gold.

How such a scene can be beautiful, but it is. De Kooning once famously observed that "flesh was the reason why oil paint was invented." It's important to remember that he wasn't thinking only of the milk-white flawless flesh of Titian courtesans but also flesh that bruised, bled, rotten away. The vanitas awareness of the 17th-century Dutch still-life painters was strong in him, the bass note to his force-of-life vigor..."

portrait of de Kooning by Arnold Newman

 
Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, on de Kooning's early genius:

"...in 1926, de Kooning arrived in New York with dazzling skills, a yeoman's work ethic, and an allergy to convention. In 1930, he found his mentor, Arshile Gorky, whose harrowing agon with the art of Picasso broached a new mode of pictorial space. By the early forties, his genius bloomed...His Pink Angels has the compacted force of classic Cubism, but with no trace of its jigsaw armatures..."

Collage, 1950, oil, enamel, steel tacks on paper, Solinger Collection

 
Howard Halle, Time Out New York, on things to take with you:

"...However, the main takeaway for me involves De Kooning’s role as both an exemplar and apostate of the New York School catechism. He was the very model of what the critic Harold Rosenberg defined as an “authentic” artist: someone who treated the canvas as an arena in which to enact the drama of self-creation, free of historical baggage. Yet his continuous oscillation between abstraction and figuration suggests a deep indebtedness to the past. He emerges from this show as a sort of proto-postmodernist: not in the sense of valuing irony, but rather, in understanding that modernism simply constituted another phase of art history..."

Orestes, 1947, enamel on paper mounted on plywood, private collection, (c) 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society, ARS (New York)

Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine, on the late works: 

"...In the final gallery comes the wintry incandescence of the last works, and they take my breath away. Exquisitely lyrical looping locutions, lone lines and coral-reef color, umbilical curves: They curl and cut back in viscous fields of mysterious expanding space. The widows and chairs of the first paintings are here. As is the space, so hard won. In this gallery is his last rite of visual passage, the perfectly titled The Cat's Meow -- centrifugal harmonies in pastel that let you see the order and ecstasy in chaos, and the chaos in order and ecstasy..." 

The Cat's Meow, 1987, oil on canvas, collection Jasper Johns