Willem de Kooning 9 1961

Robert Frank's photographic contact sheet, titled *Willem de Kooning 9*, captures the painter at work. The thing about painting is that it's so physical. I can see de Kooning here, bending over, his head in his hands, almost wrestling with the canvas. I can sense the smell of the paint, the push and pull, how he must have been thinking—or maybe not thinking at all! Just feeling the weight of the brush, the give and take of applying color, wiping it away, building up the surface, and then scraping it back down. He's constantly shifting and re-evaluating. De Kooning's paintings are an interesting conversation in themselves, but Frank's images show that artists are always in dialogue. It's like a relay race through art history. One artist hands off the baton to the next. They may not even know each other, or agree with each other, but they're all part of the same conversation, constantly questioning and redefining what painting can be.