Genuine affection, petty rivalry, and all, it could have been any village saying good-bye to one of its elders.
Continuing a dispute that probably dated back to the ’50s, one aged man in the pew in front of me turned to another and protested, “You know, in Greece sculptures mattered more than a bunch of colors on a wall.” The service itself was traditional but somehow intimate. While this must always have been so, coming to terms with it was easier for those of us who arrived on the scene too late to suffer the consequences of this alienating distance directly.Īt the funeral in a small Episcopal church in East Hampton, a few survivors of Abstract Expressionism’s Tenth Street enclave showed up to pay their last respects-or to try and get a last word in. The same drive and talent that made his art so immediate, put him out of reach as a person. For de Kooning that must have been difficult to live with, and for those close to him a harsh realization. Among all his confederates, acquaintances, lovers, and admirers, it would appear that there had never been more than a handful of people who truly interested him-and none who interested him as much as his work. His charm distracted one from this fact, but did not change it. Even when he was at the center of the New York art world, de Kooning stood apart. I too have a de Kooning story but, as is true of many in my generation who missed The Club and Cedar Bar, that story is based on a lucky encounter that meant a great deal to me but nothing, I am sure, to the artist.īy the time I met him in the mid ’80s, de Kooning had lived in voluntary exile from Manhattan for almost two decades, but one sensed that his isolation was less a matter of place or moment than of character. Needing to gather my thoughts about an artist whose work had been the focus of my thinking for the past three years and whose example dominated my imagination in early adulthood, I was glad to be away when the announcement came, and thus undisturbed by reporters eager for expert opinions or anecdotes. De Kooning had not been “with” the world for a long time, but suddenly he was gone from it. The artist had been in fragile health for years and had recently taken a turn for the worse, but I was still jolted by the irrevocability of the event. I had just left New York where an exhibition of his late paintings at the Museum of Modern Art was still on view. WHEN I HEARD THE NEWS of Willem de Kooning’s death, I was speeding down a highway in New Mexico.
0 kommentar(er)
