"Art history has decided that 1958 and 1959 are years when the style called ‘Abstract Expressionism’ or ‘action painting’ or the ‘New York School’ grew tired of its triumph and lay down to die. Jasper Johns’s Flag – Abstract Expressionism’s ghastly patriotic shroud – had its first showing at Leo Castelli’s in January 1958. You might say, especially in retrospect, that Flag was always waiting to be draped over Suburb in Havana’s dream of freedom. Flag never grows old.
‘Lay down to die,’ I wrote. But morbidity in modernist art is a necessary condition, and very often horribly lively. Modernism is an art of endings – of art’s ending – and it goes on elaborating its death rattle. De Kooning certainly did."
‘Content, if you want to say, is a glimpse of something, an encounter, you know, like a flash – it’s very tiny, very tiny, content.’
- Willem De Kooning,, 1960, to David Sylvester in 1960
"Most of [my recent pictures] are landscapes and highways and sensations of that, outside the city – with the feeling of going to the city or coming from it, you know. In other words, I’m not a pastoral character, you know, I’m not a – how do you say that? – ‘country dumpling’. I am here and I like it in New York City, but I love to go out in a car. I’m crazy about weekend drives even if I drive in the middle of the week. I’m just crazy about going over the roads and highways ... They are really not very pretty, but the big embankments and the shoulders of the roads and the curves are flawless – the lawning of it, the grass. This I don’t particularly like, or dislike, but I wholly approve of it ... I mean, I am not undertaking any social ... I’m no lover of the new – it’s a personal thing ...When I was working on this [Merritt Parkway] picture, this thing came to me: it’s just like the Merritt Parkway."
- De Kooning, ibid
:There is this strange desire which you can’t explain. Why should you do that? I think I like it because of the ordinariness ... The landscapes I made in the 1950s, such as Parc Rosenberg, were the result of associations. But I had a vast area of nature – a highway and the metamorphosis of passing things. A highway, when you sit in a car – removed ..."
De Kooning, to Harold Rosenberg, 1972
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