<Archive Obituaries> Willem de Kooning (March 18th 1997)
Bill Schenley
Photos: http://204.27.188.70/daily/03-97/03-20-97/kooning.jpg
http://www.desordre.net/photographie/photographes/robert_frank/de_kooning.jpg
The New York Times (March 20th 1997) ~
By Michael Kimmelman
Willem de Kooning, who came to New York City from his native Rotterdam
and radically altered the shape of American art after World War II,
died yesterday at his home in East Hampton, L.I.. He was 92.
A near-mythic figure in American art, Mr. de Kooning became the
embodiment of its heyday in the 1950's, when the movement that he
epitomized, Abstract Expressionism, rose to international prominence.
Even before then he was a charismatic presence on the New York art
scene, a regular at the old Cedar Bar, the famous artists' hangout in
Greenwich Village, where he became legendary for his choirboy good
looks, soft-spoken charm and hard drinking.
Late in life, he remained a striking man, half Dutch sailor, half
Charlie Chaplin in baggy trousers, with his thick Dutch accent,
home-grown English patois (the artist Robert Rauschenberg called it
"his beautiful lingo"), clear blue eyes and shock of white hair. His
off again, on again marriage to the painter Elaine de Kooning lasted
until she died in 1989 and his own health had already seriously
declined.
Mr. de Kooning was known, among other things, for his "Woman"
paintings. The female figure became the tonic note to which he
returned
again and again in his long career, and from this preoccupation came
many of his most hotly contested works: the toothy, blowzy images of
the late 1940's, 50's and 60's, which have been described every which
way: as sexist and pornographic, affectionate and funny, or all these
things at once. They are garish high-heeled figures with puckered lips
and fuchsia nails, bulging eyes and bulging breasts, painted with an
almost vicious enthusiasm.
"They look vociferous and ferocious, and I think it had to do with the
idea of the idol, the oracle and above all the hilariousness of it,"
Mr. de Kooning once said. "I do think that if I don't look upon life
that way, I won't know how to keep on being around."
These icons of modern painting have continued to touch some nerve at
the very core of American consciousness. Long before Andy Warhol ever
thought of silk-screening Marilyn Monroe, Mr. de Kooning culled
sources
from as far afield as tobacco advertisements and fashion spreads in
women's magazines. "I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of
vulgarity," he said.
He had suffered from Alzheimer's disease since at least the late
1980's. In February 1989, his daughter, Lisa, and his lawyer, John L.
Eastman, filed a petition in State Supreme Court in Mineola, L.I.,
asking that he be declared incapable of looking after his business
affairs. Much debate has focused on the nature of his art from the
years immediately preceding, specifically, to what extent his
paintings
of the 1980's may have been affected by his debilitating illness and
how much work his assistants may have contributed to them. . A
traveling show of late pictures, now at the Museum of Modern Art, has
dispelled some of the rumors about the circumstances in which they
were
made and proved that, nearly to the end, Mr. de Kooning worked as he
always had, improvisationally and episodically.
A Style Unsettled To the Very End
But inevitably the show leaves unsettled the issue of quality. The
very
last works on view are flat, weightless ribbons of color against
vacant
fields of white.
It was the final contested chapter of a career in which each stylistic
shift was greeted with acclaim by some and lamented as a retreat from
previous triumphs by others. Over the years critics contended that his
decline began as early as 1950, barely after he had his first one-man
show; others said it started in the 60's, still others in the 70's or
80's. In the 1960's, Mr. de Kooning became Public Enemy No. 1 for many
young American artists clamoring for change, though in truth painters
who built their reputations partly in opposition to Abstract
Expressionism, like Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, relied heavily
on Mr. de Kooning's example.
They could hardly avoid it. Virtually no American painter to emerge
then could. Mr. de Kooning eventually became a victim of his own
tremendous gravitational pull: he attracted countless imitators who
could not begin to match the fluency, wit, sexual energy and sheer
invention of his art, and they tarnished gestural abstraction, or
"Action Painting," as the critic Harold Rosenberg termed the style
with
which Mr. de Kooning was inextricably linked.
Somewhat paradoxically, Europeans never regarded Mr. de Kooning with
quite the reverence Americans did, partly, perhaps, because they saw
him as too European: they considered his voluptuous paint to be merely
a modernist twist on works by Dutch masters like Franz Hals and Jacob
Jordaens, rather than a truly new form of art. The fact is, it was
both
original and indebted to painters of the past.
Contained Male Figures And Blowsy Women
By consensus, his works from the late 1940's and early 50's are
touchstones of 20th-century American art. After that, Mr. de Kooning's
development can be said to have had an ebb and flow, so that
significant works emerged intermittently during nearly every phase of
his fecund career.
From his first mature paintings, of male figures in the 1930's,
through
his black-and-white paintings and "Woman" series, to the abstract
cityscapes he did in the 50's, Mr. de Kooning progressively piled on
pigment along with detail. The early works from the 30's were flat,
tensile, almost discreet images of contained emotion, with the remains
of his constant revisions incorporated like worry lines in the final
canvases.
Gradually this style gave way to masterpieces like "Attic" (1949) and
"Excavation" (1950), which were maelstroms of weaving and careering
lines and roiling forms.
By the time Mr. de Kooning got to bravura canvases like "Gotham News"
(1955) and "Saturday Night" (1956), his art had become a near-volcano
of raucous, nervous and uncontainable energy. These paintings were
discursions on Cubism, the Cubist grid stretched, pulled and twisted
until it was barely recognizable, a skeleton for fleshy paint.
By the early 1960's his art seemed to empty out, like air being let
out
of a giant balloon. Mr. de Kooning had moved out of Manhattan to live
full time in East Hampton in 1963, and he spoke admiringly of open
spaces and the American highway. His new paintings, with their big,
long brush strokes crisscrossing large canvases, also suggested the
flat stretches of potato fields and beaches at his new home.
The works he produced in the early 60's became clean slates for
another
round of building up images. The process reached orgiastic extremes by
the 1970's with pictures as dense as those of the mid-50's but more
ebullient and less frenetic. Critics called them frothy. Certainly the
ocean seemed to be in those fluid 70's pictures, with their splashes
and cascades of pigment and forms that emerged and submerged. So were
the human references. Mr. de Kooning was almost never so abstract that
he lost touch with the observed world of figures and landscapes. An
often repeated story has it that the critic Clement Greenberg, who
championed pure abstraction, insisted that it had become "impossible
today to paint a face," to which Mr. de Kooning replied, "That's
right,
and it's impossible not to."
In the 80's there was another emptying out in Mr. de Kooning's work:
heavy impasto gave way to sanded and scraped surfaces, rainbows of
color yielding to red, orange and blue bands twisting on bare
backgrounds. Sometimes, in the process of working, he blanketed areas
with white, leaving only a fragment of previous detail to bob up from
beneath the fresh covering, like flotsam in the waves. Mr. de Kooning
once said, in his cryptic way, "I have to change to stay the same." He
also said: "It seems that a lot of artists, when they get older, they
get simpler. They feel their own miracle in nature, a feeling of being
on the other side of nature."
The best early 80's pictures can be airy, lyrical and elegiac, almost
like a memory of his paintings from the 40's, without the famous
stress
and strain. One can still see his rhythmical, seemingly effortless
graphic virtuosity in the forms that spin and loop across a few of
these late canvases. But there is a poignancy to other ones, an icy
silence hard to dissociate from Mr. de Kooning's mental decline.
A Skilled Dutchman Bound for America
Willem de Kooning was born on April 24, 1904, in Rotterdam to Leendert
de Kooning and Cornelia Nobel. His father was a wine, beer and
soft-drink distributor. His mother ran a workingmen's bar. They
divorced when he was a small boy, and he was brought up first by his
father, then by his strong-willed mother, who sent him out when he was
12 to apprentice at a commercial art and decorating firm.
The firm recommended him to the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and
Techniques, where he took classes in painting and learned about the
works of Picasso, Mondrian, de Stijl artists and other modernists. He
spent 1924 in art school in Brussels, supporting himself by painting
signs, drawing cartoons and designing window displays, then returned
to
complete his degree in Rotterdam in 1925. His training distinguished
him from other first-generation Abstract Expressionists, just as his
experience in design and commercial art allowed him to find work at
places like the A. S. Beck shoe stores during his early years in the
United States.
He immigrated in 1926, having stowed aboard the Shelley. As a boy, he
had developed a romantic fascination with America, reading about Walt
Whitman, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Wild West. He wanted to find a job
as a commercial artist.
"Being young, I really didn't understand the nature of painting," he
said years later. "I really intended to become an applied artist. I
mean, it was more logical to be a designer or a commercial artist. I
didn't intend to become a painter. That would come later."
Speaking little English, he first settled into a boardinghouse for
Dutch seamen in Hoboken, across the Hudson from New York City. Then he
moved to a studio on West 44th Street in Manhattan in 1927. For the
next eight years he worked at odd jobs, painting only on weekends.
It was in those days that he frequented galleries and cafeterias and
met artists like John Graham, Stuart Davis, David Smith and Arshile
Gorky. The Armenian-born Gorky especially was to exercise a powerful
influence over him. Like Gorky, Mr. de Kooning revered such painters
as
Ingres and Cezanne, and never felt the same urgency that some
American-born painters did to break utterly with that tradition.
"It is a certain burden, this Americanness," he once said. And with
characteristic generosity, he always deferred to Gorky: "I had more
legitimate schooling in Holland, but the things I was supposed to know
he knew much better." He added: "I am glad that it is about impossible
to get away from his influence. As long as I keep it with myself, I'll
be doing all right."
Depression-Era Project, Then a Full-Blown Career
When the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration was
established in 1935, Mr. de Kooning joined its mural division. Harold
Rosenberg, who, as a critic in the 1940's, 50's and 60's, was to
become
one of his great advocates, served as his assistant on a proposed
abstract mural for the Williamsburg Federal Housing Project in
Brooklyn. The mural was never completed but a small study for it
became
the first painting by Mr. de Kooning to be exhibited in the United
States, as part of a 1936 show at the Museum of Modern Art. Most
significantly, the project allowed him to devote himself full time to
his career as a painter.
He told an interviewer in 1959 that he had had to leave the Federal
Art
Project because he was a foreigner, but that the year that he took
part
in it "gave me such a terrific feeling that I gave up painting on the
side and took a different attitude."
"After the project I decided to paint and do odd jobs on the side," he
said. "The situation was the same, but I had a different attitude."
Mr. de Kooning's work was occasionally exhibited in group shows during
the 1940's. He was given his first one-man show in 1948, at the Egan
Gallery, when he was already 44. None of his work sold during the
show,
though "Painting," was bought soon afterward by the Museum of Modern
Art.
Mr. de Kooning's poverty has been often recounted. His wife, Elaine,
said they were so short of money that whenever they cobbled a few
cents
together, they had to decide between cigarettes and food. Often, they
chose cigarettes. Out of dissatisfaction, Mr. de Kooning destroyed
many
of his early paintings ("I was so modest then that I was vain," he
once
said) and what he didn't destroy he sold for a pittance. John Graham
bought one picture for $50. Rudy Burckhardt, the Swiss photographer, a
neighbor and friend, bought another for "maybe $200," he said. "What
an
investment!" he said. "It later paid for my divorce, a house in Maine
and a co-op loft on 29th Street."
After the Egan show, Mr. de Kooning's work received increasing
attention. Clement Greenberg hailed him as "one of the four or five
most important painters in the country," and during the next few years
he was included in large international surveys like the 1950 Venice
Biennale, the 1951 Sao Paulo Bienal and the 1952 Carnegie
International
in Pittsburgh. The critical response gradually helped his career and
by
the mid-1950's collectors finally began to buy his work with
regularity.
By 1956, when Jackson Pollock died, opinion was vigorously split over
who was the pre-eminent New York School painter, Pollock or Mr. de
Kooning. ( At Pollock's funeral, Mr. de Kooning famously conceded that
it was Pollock who "broke the ice" for Abstract Expressionism.)
Mr. de Kooning had met his wife, then an art student, in 1938. "She
didn't treat him too well at first," Mr. Burckhardt recounted. "He had
to take her home to Brooklyn at 2 or 3 in the morning, an hour subway
ride each way, so after a while, they got married."
For a time, they lived on 22d Street in a loft with a secondhand bed,
a
hot plate, some chairs salvaged from the trash and cafeteria flatware.
In 1944, they moved to a cold-water flat on Carmine Street in
Greenwich
Village, where Elaine de Kooning worked. Mr. de Kooning took a
separate
studio on Fourth Avenue. Their relationship was tumultuous and
unconventional. They separated in 1955, and Mr. de Kooning's daughter,
Lisa, was born to the artist Joan Ward the next year. Three years
later, Mr. de Kooning left on a trip to Italy with a friend, Ruth
Kligman. Through the 1960's and 70's various women moved in and out of
Mr. de Kooning's life.
These were rough years for him. He drank more and more, suffering
blackouts. His wife re-entered his life in the late 1970's and helped
him to stop drinking and to renew his work. She took care of him until
her own death from cancer at the age of 68. Like Ms. Ward, she had a
house in East Hampton, not far from his.
Mr. de Kooning had moved there partly to escape the endless
interruptions that attended his growing fame. By the early 60's he had
become a celebrity, mobbed every time he went out to eat. He had first
gone to Long Island in 1948 to visit Pollock and his wife, Lee
Krasner,
and later spent summers there with the art dealer Leo Castelli and his
family. "I like to go out when I feel like it, maybe for an hour in
the
morning and again in the afternoon, and I like to ride around without
being bothered," he said of the appeal of life outside the city.
He designed his own studio, tinkering with the plans for years. He
completed it in the late 1960's, its huge glass walls and white
terrazzo floors reflecting the steely shore light. A platform
cantilevered high in the air allowed him to look down from a distance
on the works he laid flat on a table or the floor. The studio was once
compared to both a chemist's workshop and a vast kitchen, filled as it
was with his neat array of ordinary house painter's brushes, scrapers,
spatulas, knives and the large salad bowls in which he is said to have
mixed oil paints with water, kerosene and safflower oil, among other
ingredients.
He became more isolated on Long Island. But he had made several
important trips during the 1960's that altered the direction of his
art. He visited the Louvre for the first time in 1968, the year he
returned to Holland for the first time for a retrospective at the
Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 1969, he visited Japan, where his
encounters with printmakers inspired him to do freely calligraphic
black-and-white lithographs, something he had not attempted before.
That year he also went to Rome, where a friend persuaded him to try
his
hand at sculpture. For the next decade Mr. de Kooning produced first
small, then large bronze figural works, their surfaces kneaded and
pummeled in a way that mimicked if never quite matched the sumptuous,
refractory and antic quality of his paintings and drawings.
Since the 1950's, Mr. de Kooning had had major exhibitions of his work
around the world, though he complained about them. He once said that
museums treat artists "as if you are dead and they own you."
Among the later de Kooning retrospectives were a show at the
Guggenheim
Museum in 1978, another at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1983
and another in 1994-95 jointly organized by the National Gallery of
Art
in Washington and the Tate Gallery in London, a show that also went to
the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The current traveling exhibition
of his 1980's work opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in
1995 and is ending its tour at the Modern, where it is to close in
April.
Describing a Process Wonderful and Strange
By the boom years of the 1980's, prices for his art had skyrocketed:
"Interchange," a 1955 painting, sold at Sotheby's in 1989 for $20.7
million. Lisa de Kooning and Mr. Eastman were named conservators of
his
property, which included his home and art, after his wife died that
year. He is survived by Ms. de Kooning, who is married to Christian
Villeneuve, a house builder, and their three daughters, Isabel, Emma
and Lucy, of Springs in East Hampton.
Of painters working into old age, he once observed that Titian, at 90,
was so badly afflicted by arthritis that his assistants had to tie on
his paint brushes. "But he kept on painting Virgins in that luminous
light, like he'd just heard about them," he said. "Those guys had
everything in place, the Virgin and God and the technique, but they
kept it up like they were still looking for something. It's very
mysterious."
Years earlier, describing his creative process, Mr. de Kooning said:
"I
used to be so nervous I got palpitations. Now I don't have that
trouble. I see the canvas, and I begin."
"But," he added, "you have to keep on the very edge of something, all
the time, or the picture dies."
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A Life's Strong Currents; The Art Of Willem de Kooning Was
Like The Ever-Changing Ocean
FROM: The Washington Post (March 20th 1997) ~
By Paul Richard, Staff Writer
Willem de Kooning, who died yesterday at his studio on Long Island,
never knew precisely, never chose to know, where it was that he was
headed. He loved the slippage and the flow of the open situation. His
restlessness was constant. If you wish to understand the man, think of
him at sea.
A chapter of our history closes with his passing at 92. In Manhattan
in
the '40s -- when that city seized the lead in vanguard art from Paris
-- he helped bring something new, a courageous spontaneity, a sudden
physicality, to the act of painting pictures. "He was it," said
Jackson
Pollock. Alone among the masters of the postwar New York School, de
Kooning was immersed in Europe's great tradition. He could fracture
cubist space, or imitate Picasso, or make a portrait drawing that made
you think of Ingres. The first abstract expressionists -- he survived
all of the best of them -- saw him as a hero, sailing on his own.
"I was reading Kierkegaard," he once said, "and I came across the
phrase, 'Purity of heart is to will one thing.'
"That makes me sick," he added.
He was never a reductionist. His paintings clash and tremble. They are
elegant and vulgar, abstract and representational, lyrical and raw,
and
they are all these things at once.
Everything about his art shivers with uncertainty. The longer you look
at "Excavation" (1950), or "Attic" (1949), or "Asheville" (1948) at
the
Phillips -- at their landscapes and their limbs, their passages of
smoothness and sudden detonations -- the less sure you can be of what
it is you see.
Painting for de Kooning had no certain destination. In sequence he
absorbed the varied lessons taught by Ingres and Picasso, Miro,
Soutine
and Gorky. He painted anguished men in shadowed rooms, and large
ferocious women, and lyrical evocations of sunlight on the sand. And
always he moved on. He linked abstraction to the figure, and the
figure
to its ground, and the harsh, explosive gesture of the new action
painting to portraiture and landscape. Beneath the pressure of his
fierce attack, boundaries dissolved.
Do not try to see him as an abstract painter only. Consider him,
instead, America's Dutch master. You heard Holland in his voice, and
you saw it in his art. In his ceaseless explorations, the courage and
the seeking and the saucy secularity of Dutch sailors and adventurers
are somehow reunited with the look of light on water and the free and
energetic brushwork of Frans Hals.
In Dutch, de Kooning means "the king." De Kooning, at mid-century,
ruled America's new art.
Countless younger painters tried to follow his example, but not one
had
his vehemence, and none could match the singing tensile energy -- or
the power of suggestion -- of his ever-changing line.
The drawing of de Kooning was entirely his own. He'd seize his slender
liner brush, with its supple eight-inch bristles, and send it out
there
searching for new unbidden shapes. His line might trace a sweeping
arc,
then smear off into whiteness like a wind-torn ocean wave, or pool
into
solidities -- modeling a thigh, or an elbow or a shoulder -- before
abandoning its history and sweeping off again.
The cooler and more peaceful pictures of his New York peers -- the
poured webs of Jackson Pollock, the fields of Barnett Newman and the
rectangles of Rothko -- achieve in common memory an iconic, solemn
presence. De Kooning's art, in contrast, is never cool or still.
"He wanted everything in the picture out of equilibrium except the
spontaneity of it all," wrote his downtown New York neighbor, dance
critic Edwin Denby.
"With de Kooning," his painter pal Franz Kline said, "the procedure is
continual change, and the immediacy of the change."
De Kooning dreaded resolution. His paintings, like his airy studio by
the beach, were famously unfinished. He'd build them, then destroy
them, then rebuild them once again. "One month a gazebo rises on the
lawn; then the fireplace is reshaped; next a portico is threatened,"
the critic Thomas Hess wrote of de Kooning's studio at the Pines near
East Hampton on Long Island. He "probably always will be building."
De Kooning's "Woman I" of 1950-52 was transfigured as obsessively. His
wife, Elaine, supposed that that horrific figure had been summoned,
then dismissed, painted and then scraped away, perhaps 200 times.
Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam in April 1904, and some aura
of
that North Sea port, of its roughness and its traffic and its cool
reflected light, flowed into his art. He knew the city's bars (his
father dealt in wine and beer). He knew its painters, too. De Kooning
was apprenticed at age 12 to a decorator's firm, then spent nine years
as a student at the Rotterdam Academy of Art and Techniques. His
training was meticulous and entirely traditional. He learned
lettering,
foreshortening and mathematical perspective. He drew from plaster
casts. One of his first instructors there told him, "Draw without
ideas," advice he took to heart.
To the painters who hung out in the all-night cafeterias, de Kooning,
the New Yorker, was a "loft rat" with a difference. Unlike, say,
Jackson Pollock, that child of the West, or Arshile Gorky from
Armenia,
or large-handed Franz Kline, whose forefathers were miners, de Kooning
had the handwriting, the aura, of a real European. He could imitate
Picasso, or the biomorphs of Miro, or make a penciled portrait that
made you think of Ingres. No artist in his circle had been trained as
thoroughly as he.
"It is so satisfying," he said, "to do something that's been done for
30,000 years."
He was 21 when he sailed to America. He made it on his sixth try.
Three times he attempted to sign on as a deckhand, but the masters
turned him down, suspecting, and with reason, that he'd jump ship at
the first landfall. Thrice he tried to stow away. His first attempt
misfired when his contact didn't show; his second was abandoned when
he
learned to his surprise that the ship he had boarded was bound for
Buenos Aires. He finally succeeded in 1926. He spent most of the long
voyage living with the crew. He slipped ashore at Newport News.
He said, "The only word I knew was 'yes.' "
The thought that his fine art career had been left behind in Europe
did
not bother him at all. His ambition, he said later, was "to become a
commercial artist, make a lot of money, play a lot of tennis, and find
those long-legged American girls."
He spent his first year in America at a Dutch sailors' home in
Hoboken,
painting signs to earn his keep. He had no solid plans.
He preferred to live without them. De Kooning all his life was secure
in insecurity. He enjoyed getting lost.
He said, in 1949: "In Genesis it is said that in the beginning was the
void and God acted upon it. For an artist that is clear enough. . . .
One is utterly lost in space forever. You can float in it, fly in it,
suspend in it, and today it seems, to tremble in it is maybe the best.
. . . In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of
trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most of art starts to
tremble.
Michelangelo starts to tremble, El Greco starts to tremble. All the
Impressionists start to tremble. . . . Cezanne was always trembling,
but very precisely."
He said he made his pictures with "no fear, but a lot of trembling."
That phrase, a gloss of Kierkegaard, is about as close as de Kooning
got to scholarship. He was no intellectual. He said, "I have no
message." He had left his home in Holland. He'd cast off Ingres, too.
He kept deserting what he knew.
He loved drawing with his eyes closed, or while looking at the
television screen, or with charcoal in both hands. He fought against
his touch. He made his odd, galumphing sculptures by squeezing at the
clay while wearing heavy gloves.
He would not ground his art in theory. All his life he distrusted the
captaincy of thought.
Like the other abstract expressionists, he painted in a kind of
trance.
But de Kooning, more than most, was unsure of what he sought. He would
know it when he found it. The vision he was seeking kept dissolving
and
retreating. He couldn't quite describe it. It was, he said, "a glimpse
of something, an encounter, like a flash."
In February 1989, two weeks after his wife died, his daughter, Lisa,
contending he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease, asked a state
court on Long Island to declare him mentally incompetent. Yet even in
his last years, as his brain decayed, he made lyrical abstractions of
extraordinary beauty -- as if his mind were in his wrist.
No one who took chances as consistently as he did could be victorious
all the time. He did not always hit. His sculptures seem, at times,
crude and inexplicable. The worst of his blind drawings are little
more
than scribbles. And for a while, in the '70s, the garish women that he
kept painting looked like laughable cartoons of the goddess-monsters
he
had conjured 20 years before.
There was no doubt of his courage. Self-protection bored him. He
returned to full-time painting, with no hope of making money, in the
depths of the Depression. The strangeness of America, the doubts he
must have felt before his sometimes-awful pictures, and even his
senility, could never stop his searching. The man kept plowing on.
In New York in the '30s, when, in Denby's phrase, "everybody drank
coffee, and nobody had shows," de Kooning, like his painter friends,
lived in crushing poverty. "To get in [to his loft], you had to shout
through the door," Rudy Burkhardt remembered, "so [he] would know it
wasn't the landlord." Once, when de Kooning was told to telephone the
Museum of Modern Art, he couldn't make the call because he didn't have
the nickel. But the hardship of those days never cowed de Kooning. He
refused to bend his art to the prevailing styles. "He committed
himself
full force to what he was imagining," Denby wrote. And he painted all
day long.
In New York he was lionized as an existential hero -- a runner of
great
risks, a confronter of the void, a daring art-world version of
Hemingway or Camus, Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade.
He was an action painter, truly, one of those New Yorkers who, in a
phrase of Harold Rosenberg's, looked upon the canvas as "an arena in
which to act."
"It can be described (in a simile) as a shift from aesthetics to
ethics," Hess wrote of the new attitude. "The picture was no longer
supposed to be Beautiful, but True -- an accurate representation or
equivalence of the artist's inner sensations and experience. If this
meant that the painting had to look vulgar, battered and clumsy -- so
much the better."
The new abstract expressionism took over all at once. By the early
1950s, de Kooning was a painter known around the world.
"There is no single figure," Sam Hunter wrote in 1958, "who has
exerted
greater influence on American painting over the past decade."
In a thousand scattered studios, and in art schools everywhere,
younger
artists thought they'd glimpsed his secret. Prettiness was out, drips
and splashes in. They slashed fiercely at the canvas, or limited their
palettes, as he had done before, to severe black and white, or adopted
his weird colors, his pinks, mint greens and yellows -- only to
produce
a number of the ugliest pictures of the age.
De Kooning's reputation floundered for a while in the 1960s. The women
he kept painting were primarily responsible. Though he had put them in
his pictures since the 1930s, their newest incarnations were viewed as
unacceptable. They were, or so his '60s critics kept insistently
repeating, insufficiently abstract.
De Kooning first exhibited his famous "Woman I" in 1953. It is
difficult today to recall the shock delivered by the scandal of her
astonishing debut.
Abstract expressionist painters were supposed to paint abstractions.
History demanded it. So did such art-world powers as the critic
Clement
Greenberg, who wholeheartedly believed that the most important thrust
of all of modern painting was that of "the growing rejection of an
illusion of the third dimension."
Greenberg once had told de Kooning, "It is impossible today to paint a
face." "That's right," de Kooning answered, "and it's impossible not
to." But such wisecracks didn't help. Deep space was bad enough. No
theory of the new seemed broad enough to welcome her breasts and hips
and teeth.
But there was no way to ignore her.
"The painting," Hess wrote, "questioned the smug traditionalism of
vanguard abstract art, and it also struck a nerve in a larger
collective unconscious which had considered the subject of Woman to be
safe, sane, and above all pretty. . . . De Kooning's Woman . . . stuns
the viewer. Above all -- she is so ugly."
She was, wrote Leo Steinberg in 1953, "part witch, part farmer's
daughter, part mother and part whore." "Her image," Sidney Geist
wrote,
"exists in the vast area between something scratched on the wall of a
cave and something scratched on the wall of a urinal." Robert Hughes
would later call her "Doris Day with shark's teeth." There was an aura
of great violence in her lacerated likeness. She hadn't just been
summoned. She'd been ferociously attacked.
"Nobody even noticed," said de Kooning, "that she was funny."
For nearly 20 years, the names of Pollock and de Kooning had been
linked in countless art world arguments. They had admired one another.
De Kooning said: "Jackson broke the ice." Pollock said: "I was jealous
of him -- his talent." But now the race was over, and Pollock was the
victor, or so it was agreed.
The '60s argument went this way: The minimal, the cool and hard-edge
all-at-onceness were the hallmarks of the new. Pollock's woven fields
pointed toward the future, to Johns and Stella and beyond, while de
Kooning's seated women, and ceaseless agitations, as everyone could
see, were anchored in tradition and mired in the past.
"The line he fathered, as it turned out, was not the fertile one,"
wrote Henry Geldzahler of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969.
In retrospect, however, that is no longer clear. By the last years of
the '70s -- with the cool of minimalism and field painting no longer
much in fashion -- de Kooning's hectic brushwork and strange eroded
figures seemed prophetic once again.
De Kooning's pictures changed us. De Kooning kept on working, forging
on as ever. He lived long enough to see (though he might not have
noticed) his reputation rise, his paintings' prices soar, and his sort
of anxious figuration once again in style. Though none of that much
altered the way he made his pictures. The shifting winds of fashion
had
never changed his art.
What changed him was the sea. He moved into the country, to his studio
at the Pines, in 1963, and the roiling and the restlessness that had
so
long been his signature gradually receded. His last works had about
them a surprising open sweetness, a sense of easy song.
They never lost that flicker. "I go to Louise Point, a nice beach on
Long Island, where the water is quiet, not wild ocean," he said in
1976. "I reflect upon it. The water reflects, but I'm reflecting on
the
water."
Harold Rosenberg once asked him, "Has working in the country affected
your work?"
"Enormously," de Kooning said. "I wanted to get back to a feeling of
light. . . . I wanted to get in touch with nature, not painting scenes
from nature, but to get a feeling of that light. . . . I was always
very interested in water. . . . On Fourth Avenue I was painting in
black and white a lot. . . . I could get a gallon of black paint and a
gallon of white paint -- and I could go to town. When I came here, I
made the color of sand -- a big pot the color of sand. . . .
"There is something about being in touch with the sea that makes me
feel good. That's where most of my paintings come from, even when I
made them in New York."
Lasting Legacy
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden owns the largest public
collection of de Koonings in the world, with more than 70 works, 14 of
which are currently on display, including the paintings "Woman"
(1948),
"Queen of Hearts" (1943-45) and the sculpture "Clamdigger" (1972). The
museum, on Independence Avenue at Seventh Street SW, is open daily
from
10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Free. 202-357- 2700.
Several other Washington museums own de Koonings, two of which are on
view:
"The Wave" (1942-44) at the National Museum of American Art, Eighth
and
G streets NW. Open daily from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Free. 202-357-2700.
"Asheville" (1948) at the Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St. NW. Open
Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.;
Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.; Sundays from noon to 7 p.m.
Weekend admission is $ 3.25-$ 6.50; during the week there is a
suggested contribution of the same amounts. 202-387-2151.
More of de Kooning's work:
http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/hirshhorn/dekooningfront.jpg
http://www.worldisround.com/articles/7714/photo4.html
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/de_kooning_willem.html