Big City Dames

Manhattan gallerygoers are an experienced lot. Within the space of a few blocks on syth Street they can see every kind of painting, from pensive and pastoral to wild and woolly, from dully familiar to aggressively frightful. But even the initiates who pushed into the crowded gallery where Willem de Kooning's latest paintings were on show last week came out reeling a little.

Dutch-born Artist de Kooning has long been a special pride of the most vociferous advance-guard abstractionists. Yet De Kooning himself makes jokes about the word "abstraction" and confesses that he is "working out of doubt." For the last couple of years he has been doubtfully highballing down an art highway almost as old as abstraction itself (which stretches back to Cro-Magnon times). He has been painting women that anyone can recognize as female.

In his new exhibition, De Kooning celebrates woman in huge canvases covered with fierce slashes, stabs, splashes and streams of lush color. His women look as ripe as Tiepolo's baroque matrons, but they are fully clothed and mighty ugly, with ox eyes, balloon bosoms, pointy teeth and vaguely voracious little smiles. He pictures them in no particular setting, but somehow they convey the impression of being terribly tough, big-city, mid-20th-century dames.

Some pained partisans of abstract art pointed out that De Kooning was attempting to ride two horses (representation and abstraction) at once, and thought he failed. But De Kooning, at 48, had successfully shown again that he is one of the most original artists of the day.

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