Art: UPTOWN: Feb. 14, 1964

WILLEM DE KOONING—Stone, 48 East 86th. Manhattan's Dutch-born modern master tries on lines the way poets try out words. Because he begins with plan and ends with chaotic inspiration, De Kooning's first drawing retrospective provides illuminating clues to the natural forms that shape his abstractions, to the explicitness with which he builds ambiguity, to how his art is made. Forty-odd drawings in charcoal, pencil, pastel, sumi-ink and Sapolin include classical studies of the '30s, samplings from the "Boudoir" and "Attic" series, sketches for Pink Angel (the painting that reportedly copped $60,000 last year),...

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