9. Veils
Willem de Kooning
The late paintings were done quickly, with a thinned oil paint that created veils of pigment instead of the dense, scraped and jagged layers of de Kooning’s earlier work. The palette was different, too — with more primary colors, which de Kooning prepared with help from his team of studio assistants. The critic Peter Schjeldahl said the paintings displayed “progressive losses and resourceful compensations. For example, he stopped executing swift mighty gestures, and began representing them. Shapes that suggest big audacious strokes are compsed of cobbled careful little strokes. One senses spontaneity at a filtering remove; it’s like hearing jazz over the telephone. De Kooning’s last phase lacks his familiar antic anxiety.
“Late de Kooning’s are hard to describe. It’s not that they lack definition and harmony. Their adagio loops and wristy flares – mostly in primary colors, carving up bright white grounds – hang together like passages of music. But there’s no sense of a governing intention, much less of the sublime contrariness with whithc the artist once joyously shredded pictorial norms. The octogenarian de Kooning did not forget how to paint, only why.”
But this is not Schjeldahl’s final word on the paintings. (These are quotes from a 2001 New Yorker essay titled “Ghosts.”) He ends the essay this way: “But what do you and I know for certain about painting’s fundamental mysteries, which, at last, had de Kooning wholly in their grasp? The subject of his late work is a vertiginous oneness of matter and spirit, and it demands humility. I am reminded of something that William James wrote in “The Varieties of Religious Experience” about a particular state of mind ‘in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God.’ “
10. de Kooning, 1950s
“Gotham News” 1955
“Gansevoort Street” 1950
“February” 1957
“Figure” late 1950s
12. questions
In the late ’90s, a traveling exhibition of de Kooning’s late paintings was planned. News of it stirred controversy. Some people in the art world questioned whether the late paintings could properly be called de Koonings at all, they were so different. Others wondered whether a show was exploitative. Would de Kooning have wanted the works shown? (He was then in final stage of the disease; he died in 1997, at the age of 92.) In the end, the show never happened, at least not in the form that it had been envisioned, but the essays that had been written for the catalog were eventually published as a book – “Willem de Kooning: the Late Paintings, the 1980s” 
13. What is the true nature of identity?
The essay I like most is called “At Last Light,” by the art historian Robert Storr, then curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the essay, he reports on a trip he makes out to De Kooning’s East Hampton studio, when de Kooning is no longer there, and has ceased painting, “drifted away from his brushes.” He considers the paintings and finds them worthy.
“The de Kooning of anguished uncertainties is but one dimension of the painter’s complex and evolving character,” Storr writes. “The de Kooning who suffered and aged but succeeded in creating images of an almost disembodied beauty is another. Looking forward to these paintings from those of his youth and maturity, there is much to be learned. … Looking at them as a self-sufficient group, they reveal a formal and emotional scope that is astounding. Lastly, looking at them one by one, they provoke a bright mortal vertigo that only an artist of rigorous talent could have brought back from the edge to show us – and that only de Kooning has done thus far. In the end, therefore, it is not just identification with or compassion for the man that compels our attention, though as we watch him approach the final days of his creative existence with such feelings play a justly greater part in our appreciation of his work. It is what he saw in the evanescent light and what he made of it that matters most.”
14. “the radical alterations … “
In Storr’s view, the essential identity of a person with Alzheimer’s, “though altered, is intact, present, despite the radical alterations caused by the disease.” This is a road map for how to relate to the changed person, and a reminder and an appreciation of the nobility of his or her struggle.
15. Lost or Found?
the ice road home
“Considering the effect of disabilities brought on by age, accident or illness,” Storr writes, is it that which has been lost that most defines a person’s identity, or that which has been preserved?
“With respect to the human psyche and its frailties, the question of whether the glass is half empty or half full is especially difficult to decide. When a strength is lost, the whole of one’s being readjusts, and to judge someone solely by the absence or presence of a given capacity is to blind oneself to the subtle ways in which an individual may adapt to his or her predicament.
“That, in essence, is the lesson taught by Oliver Sacks, whose case studies of neurological anomalies comprise a layman’s guide not only to the outer limits of science, but to the essential characteristics of the imagination.” —
— Robert Storr, “Willem de Kooning: The Late Paintings, the 1980s”
16. “Age and sickness … “
“… debilitate, but they are also catalysts,” Storr writes. “Those stricken (and eventually, no one is spared) might seem less themselves in gross terms, but in subtler ways, they may be simply other, or different than they were, in order to maintain a more essential continuity of being. Whether a person succeeds in adapting positively to extreme conditions is a consequence of self-knowledge, discipline, support and unforseeable good luck in the unfolding of natural misfortune. It is not so much that miracles happen as that the infirmities that inevitably betray us are not always so simple or complete as their onset and symptoms portend. Thus, while the forfeiture of strengths is implicit in the human condition, so too is their constant metamorphosis.”
I have taken great comfort from this quote, for I know that Storr is right.
farther ...
17. Sunday in the park …
For much of his adult life, my father was an enthusiastic and dedicated Sunday painter. His favorite subjects were still lifes, seascapes, historical scenes. He has had many influences, but I think his favorites have always been Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper. His preferred medium was oil paints, and he usually had at least three or four canvases in progress at any given time. “With oils,” he would always say with a big smile, “if you make a mistake, you can just wipe it out, or paint over it.”
Oils were very forgiving, and he appreciated that.
18. “Who is that woman?”
A few months ago, my father put down his brushes and his palette, and he hasn’t gone back. I asked around and found an art teacher and part-time therapist who specializes in dementia patients. She agreed to come to the house and give dad a lesson. We hoped it might get him back to his canvases, and might even turn into a semi-regular lesson. He’d had lessons over the years, and liked them. We were all guardedly optimistic. Well, I was. My mother knew better, but she didn’t say anything. She wanted it to work, too.
On the day of the lesson, the teacher arrived with a box of oil pastels. We’d all decided that the oil pastels might be less confusing to dad. The teacher, having heard what we said about dad’s long experience with still life, also pulled a vase, some flowers (lilies, I think) and a tablecloth out of her bag. She set up her tableau in dad’s studio, which is an alcove off of the bedroom that happens to have a large window with good light.
Later that day, when I talked to my mother by phone, she reported that dad had seemed alternately rattled and bewildered by the woman’s presence in this tiny room off he and my mother’s bedroom. He went down to the kitchen, to which my mother had retreated in hopes of not distracting or interfering. “Who is that woman?” he said. In any case, he wasn’t inspired by the oil pastels. The still life he did that day has a sketchy, perfunctory quality. I’m sure he saw it and judged it wanting. The teacher returned a few more times, but eventually, we all agreed this particular experiment hadn’t worked, and she hasn’t been back. My father, of course, hasn’t missed her. 
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