Manhattan gallerygoers are an experienced lot. Within the space of a few blocks on syth Street they can see every kind of painting, from pensive and pastoral to wild and woolly, from dully familiar to aggressively frightful. But even the initiates who pushed into the crowded gallery where Willem de Kooning's latest paintings were on show last week came out reeling a little.
Dutch-born Artist de Kooning has long been a special pride of the most vociferous advance-guard abstractionists. Yet De Kooning himself makes jokes about the word "abstraction" and confesses that he is "working out of doubt." For the last couple...