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"Art history has decided that 1958 and 1959 are years when the style called ‘Abstract Expressionism’ or ‘action painting’ or the ‘New York School’ grew tired of its triumph and lay down to die. Jasper Johns’s Flag – Abstract Expressionism’s ghastly patriotic shroud – had its first showing at Leo Castelli’s in January 1958. You might say, especially in retrospect, that Flag was always waiting to be draped over Suburb in Havana’s dream of freedom. Flag never grows old.‘Lay down to die,’ I wrote. But morbidity in modernist art is a necessary condition, and very often horribly lively. Modernism is an art of endings – of art’s ending – and it goes on elaborating its death rattle. De Kooning certainly did." T.J. Clark, 2026 ‘Content, if you want to say, is a glimpse of something, an encounter, you know, like a flash – it’s very tiny, very tiny, content.’ - Willem De Kooning,, 1960, to David Sylvester in 1960 "Most of [my recent pictures] are landscapes and highways and sensations of that,…