Willem de Kooning at MoMA

"The most piercing, inexhaustible, and relentlessly intense full-on career survey I have ever seen in this country," said one critic. "Exhaustively comprehensive, exhaustingly large, and predictably awe-inspiring," gushed another. "The most ambitious show New York has seen in a long time --- a lavish, knotty, and definitive tribute," opined a third. Critical consensus is rare in the fractious New York art world, but the de Kooning retrospective at MoMA is virtually impossible to fault. A massive exhibit of more than 200 works, it blasts away any doubt about de Kooning's centrality to modern art, salvages his surprisingly productive later years from obscurity, and demonstrates better than any show we've seen how an artist can continue to wrestle the same devil forever.

Photos: thanks