We were greeted with more important death anniversaries today than usual. The first thing we noticed: March 19th is a bad day to be a rock musician. Free’s Paul Kossoff (1974), guitarist (Quiet Riot, Ozzy Osborne) Randy Rhoads (1982), Andrew Wood, the singer for Seattle pioneers Mother Love Bone (1990), and Nine Inch Nail’s drummer Jeff Ward (1993), all passed today. Michael Brown, the man behind the Left Banke, also died today in 1995; he’s the subject of today’s Gloomy Tunes.
But today’s Dead of the Day, is artist Willem De Kooning. One of the most important American artists of post-war era, he was a leader in the movement that became known as “Abstract Expressionism,” “Action Painting” or the “New York School.” Paintings such as “Excavation,” the “Woman” series, and the Black and White paintings of the early 60s. Using large brushes and paint he thinned with oil and water, his paintings were heaving storms of rough gestures and strong emotions. On class trips to MoMA, I was swept up by his work; he was behind only Pollock, Picasso, and Stuart Davis (whose “Men Without Women” mural in the men’s room at Radio City Music Hall fascinated me with its oversized images and jazzy rhythms) in my elementary school estimation.
He was productive artist into his 80s; his last paintings, their serene, playful ribbons of color, felt as fresh and fearless works as the turbid, almost violent paintings for which he’s best known. In retrospect, the spare paint and great white spaces might be a visual correlative to Alzheimer that eventually took his life, which takes nothing away from their beauty.
Also ending their life on this day: Jimmy Breslin, the proud son of Queens, NY, one of the greatest of the old school New York newspaper columnists, and author of the definitive chronicle of the early days of the New York Mets, “Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?,” who died last year; author Arthur C. Clark and actor Paul Scofield, both of whom left us in 2008, avuncular actor Edward Platt (1974), who as the Chief of CONTROL, memorably played straight man to Don Addams as Maxwell Smart in “Get Smart”; Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs (1950), and Arthur Balfour, the British Prime Minister whose Balfour Declaration signaling the Crown’s support for a Jewish State in Palestine was a major boon to the Zionist movement and a well-intended policy that set in motion problems we’re still dealing with a century later. The cause of death was “unremitting circulatory trouble,” which strikes us a rather poetic.
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