The Willem de Kooning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art fills the building’s entire sixth floor with nearly two hundred works, but it is still too small. A show twice the size would do little enough justice to de Kooning’s seven-decade career, which ended, in 1990, when dementia stopped his hand. (He died in 1997, at the age of ninety-two.) The samplings of his several periods, in which he continually reshuffled aesthetics of figuration and abstraction, whetted my appetite for more of each. The show demolishes a canard that the artist’s work declined after the nineteen-fifties. Only his fame did. Out of fashion, and almost to the last, de Kooning made extraordinary art. I rate him the greatest of American painters, and lesser only than Picasso and Matisse among all artists of the twentieth century. Bring open eyes and an open mind to the show. De Kooning continually contradicted the reigning styles and ideas of his time, including ones that boded, now and then, to become his own. If you cherish the ox of any aesthetic or ideological bias, he’ll gore it.
The earliest work in the show is a tabletop still-life, new to me, that de Kooning painted in 1916 or 1917, when he was twelve or thirteen and already apprenticed to a commercial-art firm in his native Rotterdam. A shiny brown coffeepot and a decorated porcelain cup and saucer stand against a background of boldly patterned fabric. The pot’s lid is clumsily foreshortened, and the cup’s handle wanders. But the colors and the composition, intensified by deftly cobbled brushwork, go bang in the eye. The second work in the show is one often seen—a large drawing from four or five years later, when de Kooning was a star student at the Rotterdam Academy. The rendering of a bowl, a pitcher, and a jug, in black crayon and charcoal, took him the better part of a year to make. Hyper-realistic in all except color, its style was the first of many that de Kooning explored and spurned. When he reached New York, as an illegal immigrant, in 1926, he brought along dazzling skills, a yeoman work ethic, and an allergy to convention. He tore into modern art.
In the late twenties, he painted still-lifes that are darkly radiant, with a sort of alienated grace; they seem, improbably, to channel both Matisse and de Chirico. In the thirties, he adopted a fashionable mode of hard-edged abstraction with hints of figuration—I think of it as W.P.A. modernism—that constituted one of his two unsatisfying phases. It took him away from visibly wrestling with elements of style. (So did the inflated rhetoric of his abstract, so-called “urban landscapes,” from the peak of his prestige, in the late fifties—the full-arm gestural forms were sitting ducks for parody in Roy Lichtenstein’s dead-flat Pop images of “expressive” brushstrokes.) But in 1931 de Kooning had found his mentor: Arshile Gorky, whose harrowing agon with the art of Picasso broached a new mode of pictorial space. The Armenian showed the Dutchman how to divorce drawn line from spread paint, and then reconcile them. By the early forties, de Kooning had got inside the figure-ground and push-pull dynamics of painting, in portraits of partly dismantled and reconfigured men and women. Pausing for a moment, he rehearsed drawing with Ingres-like perfection. Then his genius bloomed.
No one made a better painting in 1945 than “Pink Angels.” Borrowings—or, rather, clean thefts—of form from Picasso, Matisse, and Miró infuse welters of charcoal line that set off pink body fragments, in reversible figure-ground relation with passages of golden browns. The picture has the compacted force of classic Cubism, but with no trace of its jigsaw armatures. That’s key to de Kooning’s achievement, as the MOMA curator John Elderfield makes clear in his excellent, rigorously formalist introduction to the show’s catalogue. De Kooning felt back through the flattening innovations of Cubism and Cézanne, who inspired them, to the indeterminate visual depths of Titian, Tintoretto, Rubens, and other Venetian and Flemish masters. He sought intuitive ways of handling paint to mold space rather than to track plotted structures. (But he evokes, too, the Florentine Renaissance ideal, which Cubism revived, of disegno, in which drawing and design were regarded as simultaneous and inseparable.) Wherever you look in even the wildest de Kooning, you feel securely anchored. This experience reaches maximum intensity, at the MOMA show, in a wall of five (too few!) explosive abstractions from the artist’s climactic phase of 1975-77.
De Kooning’s black-and-white abstracts of the late forties and his post-Cubist masterpiece, “Excavation” (1950), can hardly be overrated, but the march-of-styles bent of modern-art historians overweights them as textbook lodestars of Abstract Expressionism. More important for us now is de Kooning’s rebellion against such confinement, with the “Women” series that he began, at small scale, around 1949, and pushed to its extreme in the two-year struggle that produced the most controversial painting ever made in America, “Woman I” (1950-52). The picture was deplored as reactionary by de Kooning’s former critical appreciator Clement Greenberg, in the fifties; shunned as too hot by the cool cohorts of Pop art and minimalism, in the sixties; and subsequently lambasted as vilely macho by feminists. I think the work is antiheroic and desperately funny. Far from illustrating Picasso-like male dominance, the female subject gains power from every swipe de Kooning takes at her, until she is a goddess and he is effectively nothing. Some complicated anguish—worth trying to imagine—moved de Kooning to throw out the seemingly unfinishable picture. The art historian Meyer Schapiro, a friend, persuaded him to rescue it from the trash. Look at it closely. It thrills in detail, from skirmish to skirmish of a war with itself, which becomes a dance.
Shoot-the-works abstractions like “Gotham News” (1955) and “Easter Monday” (1955-56), incorporating ghosts of newspaper text and imagery, followed. The subsequent urban landscapes, handsome but histrionic, marked a manic phase, in which the artist as much as embraced his public image, advertised by the critic Harold Rosenberg, as an Action painter. Alcoholic binges sapped de Kooning. In the early sixties, he relocated to the Springs, in the Hamptons. He made some minor paintings of frolicsome, girlie nudes that were seen by many at the time as evidence of a collapse. In fact, he was regaining his balance, guided by the truth of his famous remark “Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented.” The pleasures of sex count in his work of the sixties. So does watery North Atlantic light, in humid grayings of ardent hues. In these years, de Kooning drew incessantly, sometimes with his eyes closed or while watching television—sabotaging, not for the first time, the habitude of his skills. The sputtering results delight.
With “Two Figures in a Landscape” (1967)—a concatenation of surprises in lyrically slathered pink, red, greens, and yellows—de Kooning was back to full throttle. He also made wonderful sculptures and lithographs, but only briefly. I think he recoiled from the aspect of assisted production. Only in painting and drawing could he stay in the middle of creation, without thought of plan or finish. That’s where we go with him, into an eternal instantaneity—a storm of emergencies, problems, and their solutions. De Kooning relished studio experiments: mixing oil paint with water for puckered textures; wrangling screechy colors like thalo green and alizarin crimson; off-printing parts of wet paintings onto pages of the Times. He made a mad science of beauty.
The show’s concluding room should settle doubts of his last phase’s cogency. The unfurling ribbons of, usually, primary colors are delicate, rather than frail, and shift emphasis to the fiercely white grounds that they cross or incise. They seem to grope for the basic, mysterious resilience of late-Renaissance pictorial space and to find again that, yes, it’s there. The sumptuous and snaking reds and yellows of the very late “The Cat’s Meow” (1987)—titled by the artist at a time when he could no longer sign his name—excite with the air of a fresh and highly promising stylistic departure. When last seen, de Kooning was still inventing; the old art of painting was born anew at the ends of his brushes, day by day. ♦
