Sandro’s Masters of the past.

“IRASCIBLES”

Nina Leen, The Irascibles (1950) | Left to right, from back row: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne; Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell; Bradley Walker Tomlin; Theodoros Stamos, Jimmy Ernst, Barnett Newman, James Brooks, and Mark Rothko

The Irascibles were the symbol of a radical fracture in postwar American art. In 1950, eighteen artists, including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, and Willem de Kooning, protested against the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, accusing it of marginalizing the most experimental practices. Their open letter, published in the New York Times, made them famous as “The Irascibles.” In that gesture of rupture was condensed the will to definitively move painting onto new ground, free from the constraints of tradition and open to a language that could express inner intensity and universality. Among these figures, Willem de Kooning occupies a central and unique position. Unlike Pollock, who identified painting with a total and immediate gesture, de Kooning embodied the tension between construction and destruction, between figuration and abstraction. His celebrated Women series (begun in the 1950s) is emblematic: female bodies torn apart, deformed, and reconstructed through violent brushstrokes, endless layers, erasures, and rewritings. In those works, painting is never definitive, but an incessant process, a struggle between artist and surface, between desire and the resistance of matter. As critic Harold Rosenberg wrote in his essay The American Action Painters (1952), de Kooning’s work is not an object, but an event: a field in which action itself becomes art. Every mark is charged with tension, every brushstroke is both affirmation and negation. There is no conclusion, but a continuous “being in the middle” of the creative process. It is precisely this dimension that has made de Kooning an essential point of reference for Sandro D’Agaro. In his practice, Sandro finds the same oscillation between chaos and control, between abandonment and discipline. Like de Kooning, he spends a long time facing the canvas, almost challenging it, before acting. The pictorial act arrives suddenly, rapidly, but is always followed by a phase of confrontation and reconsideration. Painting thus becomes a terrain of conflict, in which the artist does not dominate matter, but converses with it, crosses it, wounds it, and reassembles it. The influence of de Kooning is also perceived in the tension between figuration and abstraction that runs through D’Agaro’s work. Although he mainly moves within the gestural and abstract sphere, he feels the need to let traces, echoes, fragments emerge that recall the body, human presence, memory. In this sense, de Kooning’s legacy is not only stylistic but philosophical: the idea that painting is an open space, where form can appear and dissolve in the very same gesture. The criticism of Clement Greenberg, who privileged the “purity of the medium” and looked with suspicion at the persistence of figuration in de Kooning, did not diminish his greatness. On the contrary, today it is precisely that resistance to reduction, that will to remain in paradox, that appears as the most vital contribution of the Dutch-American painter. In his studio in Cinto Caomaggiore, Sandro D’Agaro seems to embrace this lesson: not to fear contradiction, but to make it the very core of his work. Alongside de Kooning, the figures of the Irascibles offer further perspectives. Pollock teaches the radicality of the gesture; Rothko and Newman, the sacredness of color and silence; Still, the raw power of matter. Helen Frankenthaler, with her chromatic lightness, shows how painting can open up to new possibilities without losing intensity. Yet for Sandro, de Kooning remains the ultimate model: an artist who made painting into a living body, always precarious, always in motion. This influence translates into a practice that does not seek stable balance, but accepts the vertigo of contrasts. Each canvas becomes, as in de Kooning, a kind of battlefield and, at the same time, a revelation, a place where inner energy takes form only to be undone and reborn again. Thus, the legacy of the Irascibles, and above all of Willem de Kooning, continues to live in the present, not as historical memory but as concrete experience, one that nourishes and transforms the painting of Sandro D’Agaro.