I went for the second time to the de Kooning show ("de Kooning: A Retrospective" at the Museum of Modern Art). For the second time, I heard a woman narrate the early life of the artist — his extreme poverty in Rotterdam, his parents’ livelihood in the beer industry, how he stowed away on a ship steaming to the New World. New York City was too expensive, so he moved to Hoboken. Along with Thelonious Monk and A-Rod, Willem was a genius of Hoboken (but only for a year).
Then I drifted away from the tour, to stare at one of the early black paintings. De Kooning is educative — not educational, educative. "Educational" means "teaching a subject you wish to know." "Educative" means "teaching a subject you don’t want to know, but that God wants you to know." De Kooning has mastered the mathematics of form, the way shapes sit beside related shapes, how boundaries of objects (and idea-objects) confer with one another. His knowledge is vast and medicinal. (I can only discuss de Kooning in the present tense.)