There was a time not too long ago when “Willem de Kooning and Italy,” at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, in Venice, would have had fans back in the U.S. gnashing their teeth.
We are talking, after all, about the painter whose muscular slashes and jack-o’-lantern-faced women helped prove beyond any reasonable doubt that America, not Italy or France or England, was the new center of Western art after the Second World War. Centers come and go, though. European painting is still European painting.
And so—much like how the macho, all-American Jackson Pollock is now unironically described as a neo-Mannerist, an arranger of curls and fussy El Greco serpentines—de Kooning has made the long voyage across the Atlantic. The curators, Gary Garrels and Mario Codognato, haven’t exactly nailed the case for de Kooning’s Italian influences, not that they need to. Yes, he only made two extended trips to the country: once, for a few months in 1959, by which time his most famous images lay behind him; and again for a few weeks a decade later.
(He watched the moon landing at a bar in Rome.) Yes, there are few works by other artists on view here, and just two by actual Italians. And yes, the catalogue is a treasury of hedges such as “And who knows whether de Kooning might have seen and discussed Mimmo Rotella’s torn posters.
” All the same, de Kooning was a European-born, academically trained oil painter who loved Titian and spent hours scrutinizing Pompeii frescoes at the .