Precisely, this exhibition deals with the confrontation that a series of, mostly, New York artists had with the exhibitions organised by the Metropolitan Museum, who thought that they should get more involved in the field of contemporary art, well, in what was being known in New York at the time as contemporary painting.
Perhaps de Kooning is the best representative of the European tradition in the United States, in the way he works and in his references. De Kooning was a person with an excellent formal education on the arts. He was probably one of the authors who brought the European tradition to the United States, where it was liberated from a series of academicisms and prejudices. It then developed into a greater and freerer way, into stronger extremes.
I am here looking at a painting by Willem de Kooning called Zot. The vision is almost abstract, but there is something about crowds, heads, pieces of things, which is not very difficult to connect, for example, with the Cézanne’s Bathers, where the figures are already gradually disappearing. It is not a figure that is someone, it is a figure in a general sense, it is something emblematic. That way of measuring the space of the painting in some cases... De Kooning even talks about the dimension of the arms, so that the brushstroke, the movement of the spatulas or the instruments do not get out of size. He uses the fresco on fresco, which he finds in Van Gogh, or in the impressionists, trying to paint quickly to reflect an instant of nature that reflects an emotional, mental instant of the artists.
The use of colour with four dots... It is curious, because those forms appear with a little colour on the immensity of the unpainted canvas. The load of paint was so big that, sometimes, he used a kind of mayonnaise, where he not only poured linseed oil, but also laid eggs, and made big loads of paint, with a lot of matter that allowed him to put in huge features. Besides, you can see that those paintings, with time, the oil oxidizes and creates like wrinkles, because they are alive, it is organic matter. And, nevertheless, he dispenses with all that and reduces his work—when he already begins to have even mental problems—to small notes of color that he paints big, as if it was the conclusion that he has reached the end of his life.