Willem de Maestro

New York

‘Police Gazette’ (1955)

Newscom

A few months ago, at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, I noticed that all the greatest de Koonings were missing. They have since resurfaced, along with most of Willem de Kooning’s greatest work, at the Museum of Modern Art here in Manhattan. The Hirshhorn and the Metropolitan Museum of Art are the two largest lenders (nine works each) to MoMA’s exhibition of nearly 200 pieces from 100

different collections.

This is the first major de Kooning retrospective since the artist’s death in 1997, the first big show to span de Kooning’s entire career, the first time since MoMA’s 2004 redesign that a whole floor has been turned over to a single artist, and the first exhibition ever to use the full gallery space of MoMA’s sixth floor: 17,000 square feet. The show will also probably be the museum event of the decade, and makes dazzlingly clear that Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) is art history’s greatest abstract painter.

The retrospective was six years in the making, from the first conversation between de Kooning’s daughter and heir, Lisa, and MoMA’s chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture, John Elderfield. Elderfield traveled the country and world securing his choices for a definitive view of de Kooning and was denied only two works. One was an early abstraction, too fragile to travel; the other was Woman IV, which the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City has, unfortunately, made the only gap in de Kooning’s famous six-painting series of 1950-53.