Images and quote taken from the article titled Body and Soul by Hilton Als, found in the September 14, 2026, print issue of the New Yorker magazine about a current exhibition of Willem De Kooning’s drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago.  Als wrote that “The artist [De Kooning] said that “Excavation” was inspired by the neorealist Italian film “Bitter Rice” (1949), a depiction of workers in northern Italy which is dominated by the bodies of women.”   The same article is in the New Yorker newsletter of September 11, 2026, with the title Willem De Kooning’s Excavations of Intimacy.  [Click on either image to enlarge.]

De Kooning was a central figure in the Abstract Expressionism school of painting that began in the United States in the 1940’s.  It was responsible for New York becoming the new center of the international art world.  I have always thought these works were ugly and indecipherable.  But here is what William C. Seitz,  American artist and Art historian had to say about the movement: “Abstract Expressionists value the organism over the static whole, becoming over being, expression over perfection, vitality over finish, fluctuation over repose, feeling over formulation, the unknown over the known, the veiled over the clear, the individual over society and the inner over the outer.”  Alright.  My taste still runs in a different direction.