De Kooning Alone

Abstract

About 1960, de Kooning dropped from the charts of public sensation in contemporary art. This wouldn't be worth mentioning if de Kooning were a private type of artist, tending his own garden, but he never was. “There is perhaps more Luciferian pride behind de Kooning's ambition than there is behind Picasso's,” Clement Greenberg wrote with mixed feelings in 1953. De Kooning remained the best painter of this half-century, in the opinion of anyone with eyes in a head. He has been the best at any kind of painting, but his particular kind, based in the old European way on mastery of drawing, became uninteresting for people keen to experience the world changing and art changing with it. It was already an old-fashioned kind in terms of Pollock and Rothko. Johns and Rauschenberg didn't even have to think about it if they didn't want to. There is something still drastic, something that hurts, about how de Kooning stopped mattering, unless you don't care about history.