Charles A. Riley II reviews Willem de Kooning | Zao Wou-Ki at Lévy Gorvy Gallery, New York, on view through March 5, 2017.

Riley writes that the show “features more than 20 paintings from the two artists’ absolute peak decades, the ’40s through the ’70s … The initial presentation certainly makes the case for one of the intellectual premises for the exhibition. This is the assertion that, as the catalogue essay by Dominique de Villepin observes, these ‘involuntary heirs of two traditions of landscape painting’ found a way while living in exile—de Kooning the Dutchman in New York, Zao the Chinese in Paris—to soar free of the constraints of ‘stifling tradition.'”