Antique

Midway through the Museum of Modern Art’s enormous Willem de Kooning exhibition, the curator’s effort at sobriety, balance and perspective breaks down. Lined up on one wall, side by side, like a platoon of drunken and painted harlots, de Kooning’s landmark 1950 “Woman” paintings take over and spread their mayhem in every direction. They leer and squint and mock, and the power of their presence overwhelms the judicious argument that has been carefully superimposed on this methodical retrospective: That de Kooning’s career is best understood as a series of formal problems and solutions, a painterly quest to rethink how abstraction and representation can coexist, how the two-dimensional surface of the canvas can contain both the flat patterning impulse of abstraction and the illusionist three-dimensional space hard won by painters working centuries before de Kooning first picked up a brush.



Once again, the infamous “Woman” paintings — often cited as evidence of de Kooning’s misogyny — dominate the discussion. So much so that the most shocking conclusion one might take from this show, the hit of the New York season since it opened Sept. 18, is that they are somehow self-portraits, vivid self-representations in drag of a painter who may well have felt he was pimping his own talent in as many directions as his women are twisted, pulled, stretched and broken.



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