Jeg er i almindelighed meget lidt begejstret for ekspressionistisk kunst, men blev alligevel en smule rød i kinderne, da jeg fredag læste en artikel, ‘Willem de Kooning and Italy, Accademia, Venice — review: a brilliant, bacchanalian show’, om en igangværende Willem de Kooning udstilling på Biennalen i Venedig. Han er jo pragtfuld. Se bare her:
Jeg blev så optaget af de tre malerier på billedet, at jeg zoomede manisk frem og tilbage på telefonens skærm et ikke ubetydeligt antal gange. I virkeligheden er de 180 x 210 cm og må være en majestætisk oplevelse. Og de taler til italofilen i mig:
As the show’s poster image, “Villa Borghese” beams out everywhere, pasted to bridges, waterbuses, across the weathered walls of windswept piazzas. De Kooning, luminous, fluid, opulent, is utterly at home here, both in the watery city and among the fleshy Titians and Tintorettos he loved.
The exhibition — de Kooning’s first European museum show for nearly two decades — is a persuasive exploration of how Italy changed the Dutch-born American painter’s art, twice. It deepens understanding of the paintings and is groundbreaking in placing his sculptures, begun in and responding to Rome, centre stage.
Back home, he painted the grand trio of “abstract pastoral landscapes”, whose broad brushstrokes, odd truncations and superimpositions develop from the Roman works, and sustain their looseness and atmospheric freedom. They are reunited for the first time here: “Villa Borghese”, “A Tree in Naples” — frothy blue lapping waves, warm reddish-brown earth — and the hot pink/creamy yellow “Door to the River”. Its vigorous gestural marks balanced by delicate feathery strokes, with grey slivers between the hefty verticals leading into the deep space opened by the “door”, it alludes to Long Island, but carries Italian memories. Elaine de Kooning wrote that her husband “adores Rome, the doors are so big and you feel so welcome”.
Willem de Kooning – ‘A Tree in Naples’ (1960)
Willem de Kooning – ‘A Door to the River” (1960)
Willem de Kooning – ‘Villa Borghese’ (1960)
Normalt foretrækker jeg mine landskaber mindre abstrakte, men de tre de Kooning værker taler virkelig til mig. Jeg længes akut efter Italien.