M. Pia De Girolamo

Merritt Parkway by Willem De Kooning, 1959

Sometimes as I am talking to someone about an experience, I have a sudden revelation about it.  It doesn't come before or after but just as the words are coming out of my mouth.  It is as if the act of dialogue crystallizes thoughts that have been trying to form.

This  happened recently.  I was telling an artist friend about my recent visit to the De Kooning exhibit at the MoMA. I told her how extensive it was, taking up the whole 6th floor of the museum and incorporating all the different iterations of his life's work.  As I was saying this I realized that my walk through the exhibit was like a walk "through" De Kooning in a way.  I just got the sense that he had revealed so much of himself in these paintings and that I was getting to know him personally. I remembered that while walking through the exhibit I had the feeling he was present, right around the corner somewhere.  As I write this I recall that in the book "Art without Borders", Ben-Ami Scharfstein says that a work of art is "...the ghost of the person yearning to be known by means of the material it inhabits" and "...we would ask of the work of art, not 'what is that?' but 'who is that?' ".

The paintings change as De Kooning's circumstances and surroundings changed.  Earlier, more detailed  paintings reflect the freneticism and maybe anxiety of city life; later paintings with larger swaths of color and juicy paint come out of his time on Long Island in proximity to sea and sky.  I could identify with this characteristic of the painter to process and interpret his surroundings in his paintings.  I think they resonate so powerfully for me because though abstract, they are still grounded in his experience of the world.

His final work is very minimalist and has been seen as a decline in his abilities matching the deterioration of his cognitive abilities due to Alzheimer's disease.  Rather, the MoMA exhibit shows that these works are important in their own right. I did not appreciate them as much, when I saw only printed images, but seeing these very large airy works ‘in person’ is another matter. Beautifully balancing lines and space, they simply breathe. It is moving to stand in those large rooms among these simple lyrical paintings and see a testament to creativity infusing life until the very end.

Check out MoMA's exhibition website at http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/dekooning/  and/or go see the exhibition at MoMA up through January 9.