Dutch Treat

A powerful look back at Willem de Kooning

The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artist Rights Society

Painting by Willem de Kooning

Correction Appended: September 22, 2011

Almost from the moment he broke out in the late 1940s, Willem de Kooning was one of the undisputed kings of Abstract Expressionism--a term that never sat right with him. "I'm not interested in abstracting or taking things out," he once said. "I paint this way because I can keep putting more and more things in: drama, anger, pain, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space." It's all there in the mighty new de Kooning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (organized by John Elderfield, the museum's chief curator...

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