Willem de Kooning is generally credited for coming out of the painterly gates strong in the forties revolutionizing art and abstraction and reaching incredible heights by the early fifties and then tailing off.
Imagine it's 1981. You're an artist in love with art smitten with art history. You're also a woman with almost no mentors to look to art history just isn't that into you. Any woman approaching art history in the early eighties was attempting to enter an almost foreign country a restricted and exclusionary domain that spoke a private language.
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I also take pleasure in the so-called negative power in Grotjahn's work. That is I love his paintings for what they are not. Unlike much art of the past decade Grotjahn isn't simply working from a prescribed checklist of academically acceptable curator-approved 'isms' and twists.
