Willem de Kooning had never been to Italy when he traveled to Venice for an amorous rendezvous in September 1959. Things got complicated, so the Dutch-born artist made a quick trip to Rome — and was completely entranced. He immediately returned for a nearly four-month stay in the Italian capital, and was back again in the summer of 1969.
Those whirlwind jaunts are the focus of “Willem de Kooning and Italy,” a new exhibition that opened on Wednesday at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. It’s part of a rich rollout of events timed to coincide with the Venice Art Biennale — not all of which are to Venetians’ liking.
The Biennale, which has hosted a who’s who of contemporary artists since its 1895 founding, drew a record 800,000 visitors at its previous edition in 2022. This year, 331 artists and collectives are represented in the central exhibition (curated by Adriano Pedrosa), and dozens of others are presenting work in 87 national pavilions. In parallel to the Biennale, there are dozens of exhibitions timed to coincide with it — including the de Kooning show.
The show illustrates, through 75 works, how brief voyages to Italy shifted the trajectory of the Dutch-born, New York-based artist, who is universally recognized as a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, one of the most important postwar art movements in the United States.
Without the Rome stopovers, the art historian Gary Garrels said, “I can’t imagine that he ever would have made sculptures.” Garrels, the former longtime chief curator for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art who co-curated the show with Mario Codognato, noted that on de Kooning’s second stint in Rome in 1969, the artist started making small clay figures in a foundry of the sculptor Herzl Emanuel, some of which were then cast in bronze — and that in the four years that followed, sculpture became a central pursuit. The Accademia will present an almost comprehensive group of the sculptures.
The black-and-white drawings that de Kooning produced on his first stay in 1959 clearly influenced the paintings he made right afterward, and a number of those will also be in the show, Garrels said.
While the name and legacy of the artist are still very much connected to Abstract Expressionism, Garrels said, “it’s time that we look at de Kooning in a somewhat different, fresh way.”
“He loved American culture,” she said, “but he also continued to have deep interest in the history, the culture of Western Europe, especially Italy.”
“Somehow, that hasn’t been as acknowledged,” he added.
A short walk from the Accademia is what was for centuries Venice’s maritime customs house — the Punta della Dogana — where ships stopped for inspection. It’s one of two contemporary-art spaces established in the city by the French billionaire collector and patron François Pinault, and currently hosts a solo show by the French-born artist Pierre Huyghe.
Huyghe is known for incorporating living organisms (fauna and flora) in his art. Ants and spiders crawled the floor and walls of a gallery during a 2011 exhibition in Germany. In the 2012 Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany, his outdoor display included psychotropic plants, a wandering dog with a leg painted pink, and a reclining statue with a beehive on its head.
The artist creates situations involving animals, plants or machines and lets chance and happenstance take over.
While there are no spiders or pink-legged dogs in his Punta della Dogana show “Liminal,” one aquarium contains a crab that lodges itself inside the replica of a sculpted head by the artist Constantin Brancusi, while another aquarium features starfish covering the legs of a truncated nude figure made of concrete.
An exhibition highlight is “Camata” (2024): a film where machine-driven robots carry out a mysterious ritual on an unburied human skeleton in the Atacama Desert in Chile, the oldest and driest desert on earth. The film is edited in real time, during the exhibition, by artificial intelligence; it has no beginning or end, and is constantly changing.
Emma Lavigne, chief executive of the Pinault Collection, noted that, over the last 10 years, displays by Huyghe had featured “forms from art and forms from nature, the controlled and the uncontrolled, and they have invited us to completely rethink the exhibition space.”
“In this exhibition, he examines the threshold between life and death, between life and the afterlife, between the human and the animal, and between humanity as we know it and the new forms of humanity created by artificial intelligence,” added Lavigne, who curated the Pierre Huyghe retrospective at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 2014-15.
Disturbing though they may be, Huyghe’s artworks (which have been on view at Punta della Dogana since March 17) have not made waves among the people of Venice. The same cannot be said for “Las Meninas a San Marco,” an outdoor art installation by the artist Manolo Valdés: a row of 13 bronze sculptures of female figures inspired by the young ladies-in-waiting in the Velázquez painting “Las Meninas.” The figures stand on the most conspicuous spot in Venice: the extension of St. Mark’s Square that leads to the Grand Canal — right outside the Doge’s Palace.
Installed by Venice’s Contini Gallery (who paid 122,000 euros, or about $132,480, for the privilege, according to a local news site), “Las Meninas a San Marco” will be taken down on June 15. But some Venetians are incensed.
In a statement, the heritage group Italia Nostra-Venezia denounced “an umpteenth act of violence against an already martyred body,” meaning the city of Venice, and said: “Not everything is for sale in Venice, and especially not our cultural heritage.” It was, the group said, yet another sign of a “biennalization” of the city that has been going on for decades, and seen contemporary art overtake Venice.
The group’s Facebook post drew growls of discontent. “Horrendous, out of place, exaggerated,” wrote one commentator of the sculptures. Another said one sculpture was enough; why have 13? A third wondered whether the bronze figures were standing in line.
The timing of the installation is no accident: Opening just two weeks before the Venice Biennale, it is sure to get attention.
Why so much attention? Liza Essers, who runs South Africa’s pioneering Goodman Gallery, explained that the Biennale “has the authority, the power, the voice that determines art history, in many ways.”
Goodman, which also has galleries in London and New York, is poised for its best Biennale ever, she said: Five living artists it represents are included in the Biennale exhibitions (the main show and the pavilions), as are five 20th-century artists whom it has exhibited frequently since it was founded in 1966.
In addition, one of the gallery’s artists, William Kentridge, is being shown in a parallel space, the Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation.
“Self-Portrait As a Coffee Pot” is a nine-episode video series created by Kentridge in his studio during and after the Covid lockdown. The artist films himself — sometimes comically and using camera tricks — talking and making wall-sized charcoal drawings that represent his childhood, South Africa’s history and his creative process.
Essers said that there had been a longstanding tendency by the art world to “put Africa into one box” when there are “many countries in Africa.”
This year’s Biennale will be different, she said: There are more than 50 artists from the African continent in Pedrosa’s central exhibition alone — an unprecedented number. The exhibition will be “rewriting history and inserting a voice from the Global South into the Western canon and into the narrative of art history.”
