When Willem de Kooning died last week at the age of 92, it did not come as a surprise; he had succumbed to senile dementia years before, and a sort of deathwatch had settled over the art world as it observed, at a distance, the slow sinking of the last Abstract Expressionist. Now they were all definitively gone, the artists who put American art on the world map after 1945: Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and the transplanted Dutchman who jumped ship into the New World in 1926 and settled in New York as an illegal...
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