Although Willem de Kooning has been a central figure in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) canon for over sixty years, he has never fit comfortably into the story of modern art it has advanced. Accordingly, in de Kooning: A Retrospective, MoMA presents de Kooning as a difficult artist whose work has long been misunderstood. Organized by John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture, the retrospective offers a new interpretation that aims to challenge many of the generally accepted ideas about de Kooning’s life and work, from his initial critical reception to the significance of his controversial late paintings, in order to reorient his place in the canon of modern and contemporary art.

Who today doubts that de Kooning was a founding figure of Abstract Expressionism, indelibly linked to the New York scene out of which he emerged? Yet, in his catalogue essay, Elderfield argues that, “de Kooning’s canvases can appear less firmly attached than those of his contemporaries to the historical moment of their creation” (10). This is an indication of the largely acontextual nature of this show and to its desire to distance de Kooning from the familiar period and stylistic descriptors that have defined his work. Further down, pointing to the Woman paintings, Elderfield says, they “do not hang well on gallery walls with works by Abstract Expressionists,” and have “long posed problems at The Museum of Modern Art.” In order to solve those problems, the retrospective seeks to liberate de Kooning from context, from history, and even from his own early work.

In the first three galleries, de Kooning’s early masterpieces are recast as third-generation Cubist works derivative of Pablo Picasso and Arshile Gorky (a contemporary and friend who is here presented as a master). In the first gallery, Queen of Hearts (1943) and Pink Angles (1945)—with their quixotic pink and gold color palate and mysterious symbolic forms—are drained of their art-historical importance when positioned as the end points of de Kooning’s student work of the 1930s. These were mature works, akin to Jackson Pollock’s Eyes in the Heat (1946), which signaled a larger socio-psychological state of mind during and after the war. The black paintings from 1947–1948, including Orestes (1947) and Dark Pond (1948), which both launched de Kooning’s career and assured him a permanent place in the modernist canon, are displayed in a row in a glorified passageway leading to the third gallery, which showcases Excavation (1950). This arrangement creates a progressive sense of mounting tension in these Coptic, moody paintings; yet had they been exhibited in their own gallery and given more room to breathe, they might appear as a fully realized masterpiece suite rather than as experimental works on a march toward Excavation. The latter was first shown alongside paintings by Gorky and Pollock at the American Pavilion in Venice in 1950, chosen by Alfred Barr. Why not recreate that installation instead of surrounding Excavation with an assortment of drawings and smaller works, which minimize its art-historical significance? These kinds of choices would have presented a more rounded view of de Kooning’s work up to 1950 and provided a context in which to gauge his importance in both the history of modern art and American culture.

The Woman paintings, displayed on a colossal wall that separates this first part of the exhibition from the second, are presented as the turning point in de Kooning’s career. It was in these paintings, the exhibition suggests, that de Kooning worked through and released the tension inherent in his earlier works. In both the wall texts and the catalogue, they are discussed in strictly formal, yet lyrical terms and compared to female nudes by Titian and Rubens. This interpretation, while amiss—the paintings are as visceral and disturbing today as they were in 1953, and as violent and resistant to analysis as ever—serves the larger purpose of the retrospective, which is to make a case for the primacy of the later paintings, from the abstract parkway and pastoral landscapes of the mid-1950s to the white ribbon paintings of the 1980s, which are described in both the wall text and the catalogue as “far more painterly” than the earlier works.

Moving past the wall with the Woman series, the viewer comes out on the other side into a new world: open, spacious galleries with paintings such as Park Rosenberg (1957), Merritt Parkway (1959), Door to the River (1960), and Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louise Point (1963). In these monumental canvases, with their broad, sweeping brushstrokes of primary or pastel color, the picture plane is all surface, no depth, yet still exhibits the forceful hand of the artist. In privileging these canvases, the exhibition looks beyond the Pollock-de Kooning rivalry of the early 1950s, which is generally regarded as the high point of both artists’ careers, and argues that de Kooning was of continuing relevance, making work akin to Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, and the Color Field painters of the 1960s. It was only in the late 1950s, the exhibition posits, with his move to the Springs, his discovery of landscape, and his turn toward larger canvases and broader brushstrokes, that de Kooning developed a unique artistic voice.

But, there are other ways of reading these paintings. De Kooning’s commercial success in the mid-1950s corresponded with the rise of a new gallery culture in New York. Finally freed from the anxiety of influence, as the exhibition suggests, was he now painting exclusively for the gallery market? By all accounts, he reveled in the fame and wealth that came with his great gallery successes in this period. In these series of paintings, and those that followed, was he selling out?

The retrospective seeks to lay to rest the critical questions raised in the 1980s and 1990s about the white ribbon paintings, which were produced during and after de Kooning’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease, by normalizing his working process in these years. As the wall text accompanying these paintings makes clear, de Kooning’s assistants would project details from his earlier drawings or paintings onto a canvas and trace out the lines, which would then be worked over with a smooth, fine brush. Not only does the retrospective fail to quash the talk that these paintings were largely done by assistants, it raises more questions than it answers: Who selected the works and the details to be projected? Who applied the paint and the varnish? And so on. The sheer number of these canvases, and the bull market created for them in the 1990s after de Kooning stopped painting and could no longer oversee his own affairs, compounds the question of authorship. They are presented as the culmination of his life’s work, yet there is a cruel irony in both their production, which makes a parody of the earlier work, and in their status as trophy paintings hanging above sofas in Park Avenue apartments as pictured in the pages of glossy magazines like Elle Decor, a context suggested by the names of the lenders on the labels.

As always with MoMA’s blockbuster shows, the setting is majestic, lending an air of authority to the argument the museum is advancing. Particularly in the second half of the show, even when the paintings are ugly (i.e., . . . Whose Name Was Writ in Water (1975)), they are gorgeously installed. The biggest problem with the retrospective is that it is ultimately devoid of life, and de Kooning had a long and notoriously chaotic life. In order to keep its formal teleology intact, the show excludes too much, including de Kooning’s close friendships with Gorky and the critic Thomas Hess (Hess became a great collector of de Kooning’s work, and many of the paintings in the exhibition come from his collection); his complicated marriage to Elaine and her decisive role in securing and perpetuating his critical and commercial success (the only reference to Elaine is a small pencil drawing de Kooning did of her in 1940); his overriding desire for commercial success over museum respectability from the mid-1950s on; his fame and his alcoholism, which may have been related and which arguably destroyed his art; and finally his succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease. Unfortunately, the retrospective does little to address these last two issues. The white paintings in the final gallery are clearly staged to represent an apotheosis of some kind—perhaps the fulfillment of de Kooning’s life-long struggle to empty out the picture plane—the kind of artistic-spiritual transcendence often associated with the late style of old masters, like Michelangelo and Titian. Yet, it is the viewer who leaves this gallery—and the exhibition—feeling empty and curiously unresolved.