One of the joys of covering a Willem de Kooning exhibition, such as the one at the Bridgestone Museum of Art, is catching up with the jargon that surrounds his work. As he was a leading light of New York's postwar abstract expressionist movement, who later veered in the direction of figurative art, de Kooning's paintings are typified by a wilful rejection of modulated technique, which can evoke comparisons to kindergarten art. It is then amusing to read something like this, from the exhibition catalog:

"His approach does not differ in any way from that of the Old Masters who were dealing with a more venerable idea of beauty. He was concerned with depicting aesthetic objects of interest to his own age with new formal principles, a basic attitude that he shared with the great artists of the past."

This is rather like saying that a pomegranate and a moon rock are similar because they both exist in the same cosmos. It is even funnier when you see the artwork that this passage actually refers to, namely "Study for Marilyn Monroe" (1951), which consists of cartoonish lines sketched on pieces of tracing paper, roughly pasted onto a larger sheet of paper, and then partially colored with blurred smudges of pastel.