The Spirit of Abstract Expressionism: Selected Writings.

In 1959 Elaine de Kooning made the following exuberant statement about her work: "If a man wants to come and sit down in my painting, he's welcome and he can leave when he pleases. If a bull finds himself charging through, if bullfighters wave their capes, if ballplayers want to play in my colors, it's O.K. with me. Or if El Greco or Tiepolo wants to throw in a pile of old magenta robes, I can always use them." I have to confess that I'm not sure what I think of de Kooning's paintings (all of which seem curiously unsatisfactory in some way) but I have been delighted by her Selected Writings, which reveal her as one of the brightest and most graceful intelligences of her generation. Here is a woman I wish I had met, a woman who wrote with an unfailing elegance and vivacity that put most contemporary art scribes to shame. And she was nearly always right.

Take her essay on Renoir. Near the beginning she launches into a devastating summary of everything she finds "irritating" in his work: "It seems natural to resist him. He seems always to take the easy way. The self-indulgence implied by his paintings is suffocating. The appetite is surfeited with visions of big, fat, pink pictures; endless yards of boneless, pearly flesh; quantities of pretty, bovine faces; sentimental portraits; fuzzy, idealized landscapes--everything submerged in fluffy, feathery, sugary translucence." Since I have always disliked Renoir, I felt as if all my prejudices had been confirmed, but de Kooning does not stop here; after pointing out that accomplishments need not be "measured in visible quarts of sweat," she ends by paying tribute to a man who "like certain of the more appealing saints . . . had no trace of the fanatic and more than a trace of the frivolous," and to an artist who evoked a world in which "even onions are gay." Reluctantly, I may have to look at Renoir again.

As it happens I have been looking at Arshile Gorky again recently, and so I was especially eager to read de Kooning's "Gorky: Painter of His Own Legend." This proves that she was not infallible when it came to matters of fact, particularly geographical fact. Her version of the painter's tragic early years is seriously garbled, and she does not seem to realize the extent to which he drew on childhood materials in his paintings of the '40s. But in 1951 she was not alone in this respect, and her 1994 editors could easily have corrected her in a footnote. For the rest, "Painter of His Own Legend" is both a touching memoir and a penetrating critical study in miniature. It contains what may be the best brief description of Gorky's mature style yet written: "Poignantly graceful, Gorky's gardens at first flutter with a light and witty loquacity, but, in an overpowering flux of successive and simultaneous images, forms change, as you look, into a cruel and opulent sexual imagery . . . or plant forms change into human organs and a riotous pageant is transformed into a desolate landscape strewn with viscera."

De Kooning bestowed praise where it was due, but when it came to the pretensions of artists and the art world her wit could be lethal. Selected Writings contain one exquisitely elaborated parody that leaves you hungry for more. It concerns the work of "Adolf M. Pure, noted Anti-Post-Abstract-Impressionist," who bears more than a passing resemblance to Josef Albers. An exacting rejectionist who keeps a file of Renaissance and Baroque reproductions on hand to fuel the disgust that he finds central to any creative effort, Pure is especially disgusted by the relationship between food and art: "Too interdependent. An artist is dependent on food for life. It's an unhealthy relationship! Commonplace too. Food is food; life is life; an artist is an artist. Why this confusion between the boundaries?"

For her part, de Kooning consistently refuses to reject anything for merely theoretical reasons. This and her complete lack of self-importance are among her chief virtues as a critic. She looks at everything with a generous but finely discriminating eye, and tells us what she sees in prose that is never muddied by jargon.

John Ash is a poet and regular contributor to Artforum. His travelogue A Byzantine Journey is forthcoming from Random House.