De Kooning Research Articles

Place in Painting

Abstract This essay examines the role of place in painting. This role is multiple – at once attracting our look but also locatory of whatever is displayed in the painting itself and attracting our attention to it as a place distinct from the place where we are painting it or viewing it. Examined here is also the role of the lived body in the apprehension of place in painting: a corporeal animating force that animates a genuinely lived place as it is set forth or intimated in paintings of seen, remembered, or imagined places. Such placially specific paintings are at once a commentary and a continuation on how we experience places in the context of the lived world. Included are analyses of three placially oriented paintings of my own as well as one by de Kooning – all in an effort to show the multivalence of place in painting.

The Beauty of the Women in Willem de Kooning's Paintings.

The Beauty of the Women in Willem de Kooning's Paintings.

The Reception of North American Art in Spain: The Case of the Fundación Juan March (1975–1990)

Established in the mid-1950s, the Fundación Juan March provided an important space for exhibiting the art of the European avant-garde and, from 1977 onwards, modern art from North America. It is argued that the foundation played an important role in presenting American art exhibitions to Spanish audiences in the post-Franco years and at the end of the Cold War. The shows were organized in partnership with high-profile US institutions, dealers, the artists’ estates and/or the artists themselves. In addition to thematic shows, the foundation hosted solo exhibitions in the 1970s and 1980s, dedicated to de Kooning, Motherwell, Lichtenstein, Cornell, Rauschenberg, Rothko, Hopper, and Warhol.

Draw Me After by Peter Cole

Reviewed by: Draw Me After by Peter Cole Arthur Willemse PETER COLE Draw Me After New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2022. 113 pages. "PERHAPS IT ALSO has to do with the alphabet—that there isn't really one, that there are lots of them: each produces its own kind of thinking. Like bricks, some, fired and smooth, yield cathedrals, while others, of rough clay, become the peasants' shacks." The musings of Father Chmielowski, from Olga Tokarczuk's great novel The Books of Jacob, with its special attention to Jewish history and religion, appear to apply to Peter Cole's latest book of poetry, Draw Me After. Draw Me After has three separate but overlapping concerns: first, like Tokarczuk's character, it attempts to understand the implications of the architecture of language and alphabet, of the letters of the Jewish language as they are drawn. Second, building from a preceding collaboration, On Being Drawn (2020), it wants to pay homage to the drawings of Terry Winters, whose art is included in the book, as it enters into a dialogue with the poetry. Third, it includes translations by Cole from Hebrew (and, in one instance, Persian) poetry—ancient and twentieth century. All three converge as a [End Page 87] kind of writing in the sand, where authorships disappear, intersect, and emerge. The basic structure of this collections is provided by Cole's glossing of the Hebrew alphabet: in twenty-two beautiful poems, these letters are brought out in their very shape and the cultural contemporary resonances that they involve, for instance in the short poem devoted to ('hey'): "Hey you, she whispered / into the morning / the he inside her bare in its longing, there / in the air of soft address, flickering chicory- / black, like a con game-." Earlier, 's ('dalet') concise but undeniable statement of Willem de Kooning's Door to the River (1960) is related. In this way, saying or writing a letter turns into poetry; the letter, perhaps even, is allowed to find a voice of its own. Yet 's sweet voice is nonessential. Instead, Draw Me After concerns a much wider tradition and dialogue, especially regarding Cole's translations, which alternate with poems devoted to artists and critics, and to people only indicated by their initials. Indeed, the composition secures the effect that the difference between dedication and citation disappears. This must be what Draw Me After means: the poetry arrives from one, moves toward another. The coming together created here between the script of the Old Testament, on one hand, with visual art and poetical exchange on the other, then, amounts to an exceptionally subtle and profound Genesis and Bereshit story, wherein the response that follows is co-original with the voice that it answers. Arthur Willemse Universities of Maastricht and Hasselt Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Three Women Artists: Expanding Abstract Expressionism in the American West by Amy Von Lintel and Bonnie Roos

Reviewed by: Three Women Artists: Expanding Abstract Expressionism in the American West by Amy Von Lintel and Bonnie Roos Randolph K. Tibbits Three Women Artists: Expanding Abstract Expressionism in the American West. By Amy Von Lintel and Bonnie Roos. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2022. Pp. 341. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index.) From the late 1950s onward, Abstract Expressionism (Ab-Ex), which reigned supreme in the New York art world at mid-century but had begun to fade there, found renewed life and a new home in a seemingly unlikely location: the Texas Panhandle and surrounding areas. This development occurred thanks to a symbiotic partnership between a "closeted gay man" (2) and a number of New York City-based Ab-Ex artists, mostly women, who were underappreciated in the big city. That is one of the bold propositions advanced by the authors of this interesting and beautiful new book. [End Page 599] The Three Women Artists of the title, painter Elaine de Kooning, mosaic artist Jeanne Reynal, and sculptor Louise Nevelson, were not unknown in their lifetimes, but they have become the subjects of increased interest and regard in recent years as scholars and the viewing public have taken a closer look at the art and careers of women artists throughout history. Amarillo gallerist, teacher, and art promoter Dord Fitz, the closeted gay man, is little known, even to those who have an active interest in the art history of Texas. One of the valuable contributions of the book is its deft presentation of a rich and provocative story of "decentered" modernism, as the authors call it (2), in which important contemporary American art was as vital on the High Plains of Texas as in the sometimes myopic New York art world, with both places giving as well as taking as far the art itself was concerned. Fitz, an Oklahoman who had to reinvent himself after being fired from a plum academic job at the University of Kentucky following a 1951 arrest on morals charges, returned with his wife and children to Bannister Ranch in the western part of the state. He applied his experience in art and education to teaching art classes in northwest Oklahoma and surrounding areas of Kansas and Texas, fostering a patron base on which he could build when he opened his art gallery in Amarillo, and began showing and promoting avant-garde New York art. Through annual trips to New York, he established relationships with the artists he wished to show. He found De Kooning, Reynal, and Nevelson particularly responsive because he offered them the prospect of an appreciative public, and additional income from art sales and teaching, on a more gender-level playing field than they faced in New York, where male artists received significantly more attention. The authors assert that Fitz and the women artists who became his gallery stars meshed in part because of their shared experiences navigating gender and sexuality hurdles as they operated in male- and hetero-dominated environments. This is another of the refreshingly exciting threads of the story the book tells, one only recently being addressed in either Texas history or art history. Clearly Fitz thrived based on his connections to the New Yorkers, but the artists, and their art, profited too. All three spent time in Amarillo, where Fitz made sure they had the Texas experience. But in addition to entertaining visits, all three, especially De Kooning, who is quoted as saying, "I love Texas" (21), sold art, found new influences for their work, and developed mutually beneficial relationships with local patrons and students. This in a place that stereotypes often cast as indifferent, even hostile, to such things as abstract art. Von Lintel has already done a masterful job of showing how the Texas experience helped shape the art of the preeminent American Modernist, Georgia O'Keeffe. With this new volume, she and co-author Roos have made an equally important contribution to broadening our understanding [End Page 600] of Texas as both receptive home and active contributor to American art of this later era. Randolph K. Tibbits Houston Earlier Texas Art Group Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

Willem de Kooning's Women: A Psychoanalytic Exploration by Graeme J.Taylor. Published by International Psychoanalytic Books, 2022, 285 pp, £24.99 paperback.

British Journal of PsychotherapyEarly View Review Willem de Kooning's Women: A Psychoanalytic Exploration by Graeme J. Taylor. Published by International Psychoanalytic Books, 2022, 285 pp, £24.99 paperback. Emma Letley, Corresponding Author Emma Letley [email protected] Arbours Association Address for correspondence: *[[email protected]]Search for more papers by this author Emma Letley, Corresponding Author Emma Letley [email protected] Arbours Association Address for correspondence: *[[email protected]]Search for more papers by this author First published: 14 March 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/bjp.12826Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

The Semiotics of Willem de Kooning’s Easter Monday

Critics have frequently employed strict binary schemes to explain Abstract Expressionism’s singular contributions to art history: the victory of abstraction over figuration, avant-garde over kitsch, pure art over anecdotal illustration, action over premeditation, or escapist detachment over direct political engagement. Taking Willem de Kooning’s Easter Monday as a case study, this paper will question the efficacy of such dyadic explanations to encapsulate the diversity of New York School practice. Easter Monday includes both figural and abstract elements, some that parade the work’s impulsive and spontaneous character and others that were created by a photo-mechanical process. Some celebrate the artist’s personal and idiosyncratic touch, others the impersonality of popular forms of advertising. In contradistinction, the semiotic terminology of C.S. Pierce reveals not only multiple points of intersection with de Kooning’s work; it also effectively identifies and differentiates the plurality of elements the artist conjoined in a single visual field, some of which qualify as iconic, indexical, symbolic, or even as hybrid combinations of the above. These more elastic descriptors, it will be argued, are well-suited to address de Kooning’s variegated surfaces: they can address his accommodation of diverse techniques, as well as the multiple ways the artist constructed meaning and responded to popular culture.

Obliquity of the impastoed being

In this article we will try to elaborate a reflection around aesthetic experience, more specifically a phenomenology of artwork (Soutine/de Kooning), in dialogue with Emmanuel Falque's thought. Even if the French philosopher has not yet dedicated an autonomous work to the aesthetic question, such reflection appears abundantly dispersed and sparse in his various writings. Among others, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud were Falque's artists of choice, their work most closely reflected his underlying philosophical thesis. The preference for the figurative, that which in us resists phenomenology, the incarnation as such, would thus bring the philosophical concept and the artistic intuition closer together. However, between figurative and non-figurative or abstract thought, is there not another possibility of thinking them together, without necessarily having to give primacy to one or the other or opposing them? The idea of an oblique incarnate thought (figuration-abstraction, resistance-deflagration, word-silence), or of the diagonal/oblique impastoed being (presence in absence, metamorphosed transcendental materiality, indirect ontology), might also be a third way of thinking about the great philosophical questions between realism and idealism, immanence and transcendence, visible and invisible, metaphysics and phenomenology. In this sense, the artistic work of Chaïm Soutine and de Kooning may be the aesthetic expression of incarnate thought, as a way of primordial access to being, to the world and to another, in the joining in act of the figurative and the abstract, as if multiple possibilities or dimensions of being inhabited in the same being (the articulation of the in-itself and the outside of the self, madness and normality, dream and reality...). Not by chance both were the subject of a recent joint exhibition, from which we propose this reflection, in dialogue with Emmanuel Falque's thought on finitude, which his most recent book radicalises. Our thesis, based on these two artists, aims to affirm that art, whether figurative or abstract, starts from an inalienable material dimension, that is to say, a sensitive dimension, the impasted (body) being, to the point that we may say that Hors phénomène maintains in itself this possibility of articulation between presence to the self and the outside of the self, distance and proximity, immanence and transcendence, even if here and there one can glimpse in its philosophical project an ontological preference for the figurative. However, in our view, what brings together Falque’s philosophy and the work of both artists is the fact that they are the expression of an embodied thought, whether through conceptual experience (philosophy) or through perceptual experience (aesthetics).

Lonnie Holley: Tangled Up in de Kooning’s Fence, Curated by Alison M. Gingeras Lonnie Holley at the Elaine de Kooning House: Everything That Wasn’t White

Review of: Lonnie Holley: Tangled Up in de Kooning’s Fence, Curated by Alison M. Gingeras South Etna Montauk Foundation, New York, 1 May–1 August 2021 Lonnie Holley at the Elaine de Kooning House: Everything That Wasn’t White Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York, 24 April–6 September 2021

Artist-specific style transfer for semantic segmentation of paintings: The value of large corpora of surrogate artworks

Deep neural networks for semantic segmentation have recently outperformed other methods for natural images, partly due to the abundance of training data for this case. However, applying these networks to pictures from a different domain often leads to a significant drop in accuracy. Fine art paintings for highly stylized works, such as from Cubism or Expressionism, in particular, are challenging due to large deviations in shape and texture of certain objects when compared to natural images. In this paper, we demonstrate that style transfer can be used as a form of data augmentation during the training of CNN based semantic segmentation models to improve the accuracy of semantic segmentation models in art pieces of a specific artist. For this, we pick a selection of paintings from a specific style for the painters Egon Schiele, Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Willem de Kooning, create stylized training dataset by transferring artist-specific style to natural photographs and show that training the same segmentation network on surrogate artworks improves the accuracy for fine art paintings. We also provide a dataset with pixel-level annotation of 60 fine art paintings to the public and for evaluation of our method.

The Cage Case. Arts and Social Neuroscience.

A great story told by a musician is the basis of the best stage experimentation of the second half of the 20th century. The musician is John Cage, whose work synthesizes the entire system of arts within the extraordinary world of the avant-garde. This great story begins with the experimental artistic activities which were developed in the 1920s, consolidated in the thirties and continued through the post-war period up to the dawn of the fifties. Apart from the socio-historical cross-section Cage’s experimentation provides, it is also a pretext for reflecting on the artist’s work as well as the relationship between neuroscience and art. Important contributions to this topic come from the neuro-scientific-social research on new expressions “of creativity, imagination, genius” (Pecchinenda, 2018). This study is based on the assumption that Cage was the forerunner of neuronal experimentation that would be central to the experiments and research of many other artists. The theoretical reference model can be found in the research of the neuroscientist Kandel et al, whose work was the starting point for this investigation. Kandel grasps the definitive break between scientific logic and humanistic sensitivity in the methodological reductionism practiced by neuroscience and in the experiments of contemporary creativity. According to Kandel, both neuroscience and artistic experimentation have similar objectives and problems, and in some respects seem to develop similar methodological practices. Kandel identifies the use of memory, synthesis and knowledge of the world in authors such as Mondrian, de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, Louis, Warhol as well as the New York school of which Cage was an important member. The relationship between art and neuroscience is synthetized in the avant-garde action of Cage and in all the artists who launched continuous attacks against traditional forms. The transition from figurative art to abstraction is “comparable” to the reductionist process that is used in the scientific field to explain complexity and phenomenology. The prolegomena of this discourse are anticipated by a previous work written by Kandel in 2012 and can also be found in other studies on the relationship between neuroscience and art, in particular in the reflections of the neurobiologist and father of neuroaesthetics, Semir Zeki. Zeki analyzed artists work as a practice perfectly comparable to the research carried out by neuroscientists. Cage, the focus of this investigation, carried out a sound-stage-vision experimentation affecting theatre, media and art which can be examined from at least two different perspectives. The first concerns the definitive subversion of “innate rules of perception” (Kandel) and the second deals with the relationship between art and neuroscience.

Pintoras e gravadoras expressivas

Neste artigo, visa-se estabelecer considerações sobre a arte informalista e expressionista abstrata no Brasil, a partir da atuação de gravadoras e pintoras que aderiram às abstrações não-geométricas ou experimentaram nessa direção, entre as décadas de 1950 e 1960, sendo que muitas também desempenharam funções pedagógicas. Nomes como Fayga Ostrower e Yolanda Mohalyi são mais conhecidos, tendo sido objeto de textos críticos de época e de exposições individuais ao longo dos anos. Na gravura, chamam atenção Anna Bella Geiger e Edith Behring, além do ateliê de gravura do Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro – MAM RJ, na qual atuaram como estudante e professora, respectivamente. Entretanto, a pintora Sheila Brannigan é uma referência pouco lembrada, embora frequente na imprensa da época. Conceitualmente esta reflexão apoiar-se-á, por um lado, na crítica brasileira de meados do século XX sobre essas artistas; por outro, nos estudos de orientação feminista sobre o Expressionismo Abstrato, trazendo novas análises sobre a produção de artistas como Elaine de Kooning, Hedda Sterne e Helen Frankenthaler. O corpus eleito para a pesquisa concentra-se na coleção do Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo – MAC USP, uma vez que conta com exemplares significativos da obra das artistas mencionadas.

Recovery Work: Nathaniel Kahn's The Price of Everything and Mary Gabriel's Ninth Street Women

Recovery Work:Nathaniel Kahn's The Price of Everything and Mary Gabriel's Ninth Street Women John Paul Rollert Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art. Mary Gabriel. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2018. Pp. 944. $24.99 (paper); $12.99 (eBook). The Price of Everything. Directed by Nathaniel Khan. New York: Lorber Films (Kino), 2018. "The only way to make sure that cultural artifacts survive is for them to have a commercial value," Simon de Pury declares in the opening chapter of The Price of Everything, Nathaniel Kahn's cinematic meditation on the ambivalent relationship between commerce and contemporary art. The Swiss auctioneer speaks with the solemnity of an oracle, but he is hardly an objective observer of the art market, which, in 2017, reached an estimated $63.7 billion in sales. Still, in a narrow sense, he's right. The care you give your coffee mug is not that which you extend your 401(k). The one merely keeps you company; in the back of your mind, the other always accompanies you. So it is with any substantial investment. You strive to protect it, an undertaking, in the case of megadollar artworks, that is not encompassed by the mere purchase of picture wire and resilient wall hooks. At a minimum, a collector must also reckon with insurance, transportation costs, and upkeep aplenty, but in the rarified sphere that de Pury has in mind, there are sizable outlays of all sorts—museum benefactions, major exhibitions, artist's foundations, the academic enterprise of a catalogue raisonné, and endless marketing—that, stitch by stitch, embroider yet another name in the endless tapestry of art history. [End Page 377] But what about the artworks that fail to make the cut? Is the tautology de Pury assumes foolproof? Is a work of art a cultural artifact because it has commercial value, and does it have commercial value because it is a cultural artifact? Surely de Pury would never say as much, but the question (sotto voce) clearly motivates Kahn's inquiry. It also motivates Mary Gabriel, whose page-turning work of popular history, Ninth Street Women, was released not long before The Price of Everything. Insofar as it spotlights a series of art market underachievers from the abstract expressionist movement, the subtitle of the book—Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement that Changed Modern Art—makes clear that, as an exercise in art history, Gabriel's is a work of reevaluation. The moment is a long time coming, far longer, one suspects, than any of the artists surveyed could have imagined. Take the most enigmatic among them, Elaine de Kooning. She was a formidable individual, a woman no more likely to be perturbed than she was liable to be dismissed. The critic Lawrence Campbell likened her to "a figure out of Baroque history" who proceeded through life without "a sense of her own boundaries," a quality that younger artists like Grace Hartigan at once admired in de Kooning and hoped to discover in themselves (Campbell quoted in Gabriel, 62). "[F]earless and honest" was the impression she made on Hartigan in 1948 during their first meeting at her husband Willem's studio. As the younger woman later confided to her journal: "I had my model" (Hartigan quoted in Gabriel, 254). In January of 1971, however, de Kooning was perturbed precisely because she had been dismissed, in the pages of ARTnews, no less, the publication her own writing was synonymous with. She wasn't alone. The very title of Linda Nochlin's essay, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?," was nothing if not unequivocal in its judgment on the contributions of female artists, including those, like de Kooning and Hartigan, who had been part of the most important movement in the history of American art. Restlessness is an essential characteristic of contemporary art, and by the time of Nochlin's provocation, Abstract Expressionism had receded from the vanguard of American art to make way for Pop Art, Minimalism, and other movements whose answers...

The Challenge of the Poetic: Criticism in Search of the Real. With a Debt to bOb Van Reeth, 1975–1985

As the 1970s witnessed a growing concern for social issues, which were not addressed by most of post-war modernist projects, architects and intellectuals proposed various approaches to claiming a social engagement in architecture. As these attempts to connect with a social agenda often put the notion of architecture’s autonomy under strain, likewise pleas for a more engaged public debate seemed to question the autonomy of architectural discourse. This paper discusses one particular trajectory in the history of architectural criticism that aimed to resist such an opposition and defended the public merit of an autonomous notion of architecture. It does so by pointing to and interpreting the consequences of an argumentative shift subtending the self-understanding of criticism in Flanders, roughly from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. This shift involves the postulate of “the real” as a wilfully and strategically used category and revolved around the understanding that the essence of architecture is inexpressible in language. On the basis of such understanding, “the poetic” then became a model to deal with these limits of language and was presented as the challenge for both architecture and architectural criticism. As this shift is more a shared understanding than an individual affair, this paper focuses on the symbiotic relation of architect bOb Van Reeth (born 1943) and critics Geert Bekaert (1928–2016) and Mil De Kooning (born 1955) to trace the genesis of this postulated category, rather than delimiting the scope by discussing a single critic or journal.

Art, créativité, cerveau et douleur de vivre

Creativity is a physiological function in humans, but certain people have an « extraordinary » creativity, including in art. Brain processes, which underlie creativity, remain poorly known, but recent research suggests a global cerebral activity, during which disinhibition, free associations, and plastic reconstruction may mainly involve frontal regions and tertiary parietal areas. Neurological diseases in artists allow to address relationships between brain and art, in painters (de Kooning, Manet…), writers (Larbaud, Baudelaire…) or musicians (Mussorgski, Donizetti…). Style changes after a brain lesion is particularly interesting, but must be addressed with caution, given the fact that style may also evolve in many artists without any neurological disease. The role of physical pain and moral suffering also appears critical in numerous artistic creative processes.

Expanding Abstract Expressionism: Elaine de Kooning, Action Painting, and the American West

Elaine de Kooning’s work in the southern Great Plains region between the 1950s and 1980s demonstrates that the artist achieved a hard-fought self-sufficiency, as she established her own regionally influenced style and subject matter. Inspired by the cowboy ethos and limitless horizons of the American West, de Kooning teamed with Texas-based dealer, Dord Fitz, who championed her art, promoting it to his students and patrons, and who worked with de Kooning to introduce many westerners to artistic abstraction. Challenging the more patriarchal, exclusive, and nationalist traditions endorsed by Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, de Kooning’s western production, much of which has been previously uncatalogued, exemplifies her performative, gender-based, inclusive approach to action painting. De Kooning’s Abstract Expressionist aesthetic complicates assumptions about the one-way power relationships between the dominant and marginalized, the geographical center and regional periphery, insisting on an accessible, polycentric view of modern art.

Abstract Expressionists and Brain Disease.

Visual art is one of the means of non-verbal communication that bypasses cultural, societal, language and, more importantly, time differences. It allows for establishing a multilevel connection between the artist and art receiver. Production of visual art is a form of expression of emotions. Art reception involves the initiation of a cascade of emotions and thoughts based on visual input. One of the ways to express artistic content is through abstraction. Abstract visual art is based on portraying elements that do not represent any real, objective shapes, with the means of lines, colours, tones and texture. Abstract expressionism is a form of abstract art infused with strong emotional and expressive content. The combination of expression of emotions in abstraction requires almost direct translation between neuronal function and artistic output without using formal shapes or references as means of communication. That is why it is very interesting to look at the artistic output in abstract expressionists with neurological disorders affecting the brain. Here, we review several key abstract expressionists, including James Brooks, Agnes Martin and Willem de Kooning, and their artistic production in the context of brain disease.

Dementia and Change of Style: Willem de Kooning - Obliteration of Disease Patterns?

The studies on the relation between artistic production, especially visual art, and brain function gave a basis to the development of neuroesthetics. Most of the information on brain artistic creativity comes from studies on brain disease in well-established visual artists. Brain disease may cause change, dissolution, or emergence of artistic creativity. The visual artistic production may become impaired in individuals with a variety of brain diseases, including focal and generalised disorders of sudden and slowly progressive onset. In addition to that, neurological disorders may add content into visual art production, even becoming the artistic theme. Here, we discuss the particular case of abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning and the evolution of his artistic production in the context of his neurodegenerative illness. The change of de Kooning's artistic style has been the subject of many reviews, and the main focus of this paper is on artistic style across his prolific artistic career in the context of his progressive neurological condition, which he developed in his late years, and his long history of alcohol addiction. There are conflicting data from the literature on the effect of his neurological condition and clear cognitive decline on his artistic output, with preservation of recognition and the quality of his art. Hence, two pertinent questions relate to how he was able to maintain his output despite his cognitive decline, and how his condition could have affected his work.

FICTION IN REVIEW

1 5 4 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W A Y T E N T A R T I C I ‘‘For her part, Alice was starting to consider really rather seriously whether a former choirgirl from Massachusetts might be capable of conjuring the consciousness of a Muslim man.’’ Having just ordered hotdogs from a halal cart on the Upper West Side, the twenty-something publishing assistant Alice in Lisa Halliday’s striking debut novel Asymmetry asks herself a delicate compositional question: Can a white Christian girl from New England accurately portray the consciousness of a male Muslim immigrant ? Jonathan Franzen would tend to say no. In a 2016 interview with Slate, the American novelist argued that not having many African American friends precluded him from writing a novel with a black protagonist: ‘‘If you have not had direct firsthand experience of loving a category of person – a person of a di√erent race, a profoundly religious person, things that are real stark differences between people – I think it is very hard to dare, or necessarily even want, to write fully from the inside of a person.’’ Franzen frames the choice to represent otherness not just as an act A s y m m e t r y : A N o v e l , by Lisa Halliday (Simon and Schuster, 288 pp., $26) 1 5 5 R of audacity but also as an almost unnatural, transgressive wish. The polemic is as old as James Joyce’s rendering of the inner thoughts of an Irish Jew, Leopold Bloom, but is given fresh life in Asymmetry, which both rises to the challenge of and wrestles with the possibility of intercultural representation. Asymmetry has an unusual tripartite structure. The first section , titled ‘‘Folly,’’ chronicles the relationship between Alice and the aging writer Ezra, and is modeled on Halliday’s own relationship with Philip Roth when she was in her twenties and he in his sixties. By contrast, the second section, ‘‘Madness,’’ is the firstperson account of Amar, an Iraqi American graduate student of Kurdish extraction, in the period leading up to and just after the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. The third part, ‘‘Ezra Blazer’s Desert Island Discs,’’ loops back to the fictionalized version of Roth, but in the unconventional format of a BBC radio interview. Halliday thus deliberately mixes writing about what she knows, her relationship with Roth, with writing about what she ostensibly does not, the first-person account of an Iraqi American. While ‘‘Folly’’ covers familiar ground, taking place in literary New York, mostly within a couple of blocks between Amsterdam and Broadway , ‘‘Madness’’ shuttles among Los Angeles, New York, London, Amman, Baghdad, and Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan. Intensifying the geographical unfamiliarity, Amar finds himself navigating culturally liminal and often uncomfortable spaces: a windowless immigration holding room at Heathrow, a smoke-filled rental car shared with an Iraqi intelligence o≈cer on the road from Jordan to Iraq. The sweep of Halliday’s novel at first feels at odds with the fiction of Roth, who, after all, wrote nine novels about his own literary alter-ego, Nathan Zuckerman. That outsized attention to male ego at the expense of all else led Sondra Bleich to remark that ‘‘Roth’s women either materialize out of a Dewing landscape, so ethereal as to be unattainable, or lunge at us from a De Kooning abstract, so gross as to be totally undesirable. In either case, they are unreal.’’ The alleged flatness of his female characters has resulted in the oft-repeated critical appraisal of his work as closeminded and misogynist. While Halliday wanders the globe, Roth is stuck in suburban New Jersey. In Asymmetry, Roth’s doppelgän- 1 5 6 T A R T I C I Y ger, Ezra, even admonishes Alice with the hackneyed MFA dictum to write what she knows: ‘‘Do you write about this? About us?’’ ‘‘No.’’ ‘‘Is that true?’’ Alice shook her head hopelessly. ‘‘It’s impossible.’’ . . . Ezra looked skeptical. ‘‘Do you write about your father?’’ ‘‘No.’’ ‘‘You should. It’s a gift.’’ ‘‘I know. But writing about myself doesn’t seem important enough.’’ ‘‘As opposed to...

Between creativity and death: Abstract expressionists and alcohol use disorders

American Expressionists were a group of American artists who valued free expression of unconscious elements, combining emotional intense expressions with anti-figurative abstract style. Their main place of creative debates was Cedar Tavern in New York City, considered by art critics an important incubator of the Abstract Expressionism. Jackson Pollock, one of the most prominent figures of this movement, suspected of having bipolar disorder, abused alcohol during long periods of his life, for which he even underwent psychotherapy. Unfortunately, he died in a car accident while driving under influence, after decades of innovative work, during which he created a new painting method and produced compositions which are nowadays between the most expensive works of art. Mark Rothko also had periods of heavy drinking, and finally he died by cutting his arms with a razor. He is considered a genius, who created a completely new perspective over painting, and his works are also between the most expensive paintings in the world. Willem de Kooning was affected by alcoholism since his early years, and developed dementia, at least partially induced by abusive drinking. Although affected by neurocognitive disorder, he continued to produce amazingly creative paintings until his final years and in 2016 one of his works obtained the record for the most expensive painting ever sold. Using alcohol as a tool for increasing creativity risks to expose the creator to severe disorders or even death, the subject walking on a narrow line between sublimation of unconscious impulses and tragic resignation before them.Disclosure of interestThe presenting author was speaker for Bristol Myers Squibb and Servier, and participated in clinical research funded by Janssen Cilag, Astra Zeneca, Eli Lilly, Sanofi Aventis, Schering Plough, Organon, Bioline Rx, Forenap, Wyeth, Otsuka Pharmaceuticals, Dainippon Sumitomo.