“Jasper Johns,” I once heard an art dealer declare,
“is the Rembrandt of our time.” It speaks to the
pressures of the marketplace and the hyperbole it can
generate that such an opinion is shared by not a few members
of the art world. Yet if Johns, that dour dauber of
flags and targets, has been accorded the status of an old
master, what are we to make of Willem de Kooning? De
Kooning is, after all, one of the pioneers of Abstract
Expressionism, the artist for whom the label “action
painting” was all but tailor-made. He has long been
a figure of mythic dimensions, as are many of the artists
associated with the New York School, and it’s easy to
ascertain why. As the contemporary art scene is
characterized more and more by triviality, the era of
Abstract Expressionism acquires an almost magical
ambiance. Whatever its merits as art—and with
hindsight, they are less monolithic than was once
supposed—Abstract Expressionism was the last
identifiable movement defined by a seriousness of pursuit,
and one of its key figures was Willem de Kooning.

De Kooning, more so than Gorky or Pollock, is a
towering figure in American art, and the adulation
extended toward him has often reached hysterical levels.
Tales of de Kooning imitators during the halcyon
days of the New York School are both legion and true; some
artists even went so far as to affect de Kooning’s Dutch
accent. It would not be preposterous to state that,