Abstract Expressionism review – a colossal event

Royal Academy, London
It’s a thrill to see the wildly beautiful art of Pollock, Rothko, De Kooning et al up close. Though you can have too much of a good thing…There is an unnerving surprise at the start of this show. It is Mark Rothko’s self-portrait. The artist of those numinous veils of colour, his aims (and his rhetoric) so transcendent, turns out to be a big lug in a brown jacket who can’t draw his painting hand and botches his mouth. He is wearing tinted spectacles