8. Portraits …

December 21, 2009 at 3:23 pm (Uncategorized)

There is some evidence that the creative urge, and an individual’s style, and tastes, are the last to be stripped away by Alzheimer’s disease. fall away. The Abstract Expressionist master Willem de Kooning was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in the late 70s, but continued to paint, and in the next decade, produced more than 280 luminous paintings. These late paintings, as they are known, are very different looking from the jagged, stormy, scraped style that made de Kooning world famous in the 1950s, and, in the opinion of most art historians, moved the focus of the international art world away from Europe, where it had been for 300 years, to New York. De Kooning did so much muscular scraping on his canvases at that time that he used hollow doors as stretchers for his canvases.

Willem de Kooning

"Woman, II" 1950s

"Woman"