Willem De Kooning (1904–1997)

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Lineage: de Kooning and His Influence at Skarstedt, New York, this catalogue features full plate images, details, and installation photographs, as well as an essay by art historian and scholar Michael FitzGerald.

This exhibition and catalogue explore de Kooning’s influence on six significant contemporary artists: Joe Bradley, George Condo, Brice Marden, Albert Oehlen, Sue Williams, and Christopher Wool. In the late 1980’s, with a renewal of focus and vision, de Kooning became “aware of his own mortality and the fragility of painting itself [and] applied himself with all deliberate speed to forge a lasting legacy” (J. Zilczer, “Chapter 5: Looking Back,” A Way of Living: The Art of Willem de Kooning, New York, Phaidon, 2014, p. 232). By considering the last decade of de Kooning’s oeuvre as a distillation of his life’s work alongside Bradley, Condo, Marden, Oehlen, Williams, and Wool, the similarities in contour and brushwork can be traced to a subsequent generation of painters, thus furthering the legacy of one of the 20th Century’s most original and influential artists.… (mer)

"De Kooning's art testifies to a refusal to be either recruited or pushed aside. His expansion of the resources of painting as a means by which the sensibility can interact with chance, impulse, the given, and the unknown, presupposes that the individual as he is will continue to oppose himself and all systems. If ideology is the ghost that haunts post-war painting, de Kooning haunts the ghost. He is the nuisance of the individual 'I am' in an age of collective credos and styles." -Harold Rosenberg… (mer)