"De Kooning is one of our most famous artists. We’ve heard about his drinking and womanizing. Since 1974, we’ve noted his pictures’ record prices. And we’ve read plenty on his decline into dementia in the 1980s, and the paintings he kept making despite it. But we still don’t know what to do with his art. “The range of talent and innovation in de Kooning is similar to that of Cézanne,” said Richard Shiff, a great Cézanne scholar who is publishing a new book on de Kooning. John Elderfield, the MoMA show’s curator, writes that his painter embraces “difficulty, resistance, and ambiguity.”
