On de Kooning's Late Style

Abstract

So concerned has our century been with the forward-looking thrills of youthful innovation that for decades, the late styles of many of our most venerable major and minor masters—from Picasso, Braque, and de Chirico to Chagall and Picabia—have been slighted by indifference or downright insult. But as our century approaches its own frightening sunset years, the mellowness of ripe old age and retrospection have slowly become positive, not negative values. Such thoughts are prompted here by the presentation of an anthology of paintings executed in the three years from 1983 to 1986 by one of our century's oldest living great masters, Willem de Kooning, who, for a long time, tended to be written out of art history after he had scorched his name in it forever with the indelible Woman series of the early 1950s.