De Kooning’s panoramic MoMA retrospective

To understand the revolutionary quality of Willem de Kooning’s figural paintings, consider the emphasis on purity and abstraction that mid-century Modernism demanded. “Advanced” painters needed to pare away illusion to arrive at line, color and form on a flat, rectangular picture plane.

“Purity in art,” according to influential critic Clement Greenberg, “consists in the acceptance . . . of the limitations of the medium of the specific art.” Greenberg claimed that artists could ignore the demands of their moment in time at the peril of artistic enervation and obsolescence. “The imperative,” he writes in Towards a Newer Laocoon (1940), “comes from history, from the age in conjunction with a particular moment reached in a particular tradition of art. This conjunction holds the artist in a vise from which at the present moment he can escape only by surrendering his ambition and returning to a stale past.”

A lack of clear direction in today’s art-world makes it difficult to fully appreciate the inflexibility of 1950s aesthetics. We can longer visualize, without irony, a straight line of progression from the first human scribblings to the height of representation in the Renaissance, and onward to the apex of advanced art: abstraction. When de Kooning first stopped disguising the figurative elements in his work, it was the art world equivalent of insisting that a round Earth orbited the Sun. He strained against the tyranny of the mainstream avant-garde with its proscriptions against subject matter.

“You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain,” he complained, and the “pure form of comfort became the comfort of pure form,” which they “generalized, with their book-keeping minds, into circles and squares.” Although, or perhaps because he struggled with the dogma of his time, his work still appears fresh and timeless today.

Portrait of Elaine, the woman he married in 1943, is one of the most interesting drawings from the early 1940s. The background is barely suggested, her oversized garments are lightly outlined, and her head and hands emerge as the only modeled forms. She is seated, but not at rest despite the relaxed pose. Her head is too large for her body and her eyes are bigger still, staring with an intensity that prefigures the famous Woman paintings.

In 1947-48, de Kooning launched a series of combined male and female figures. In Untitled (Man and Woman), keeping with traditional Western ideas, the man is self-contained, upright, separated from the environment, and looks heavenward. The woman seems to be leaking or exploding into a landscape. Gradually, in de Kooning’s work, a second female replaces the male form, which de Kooning based on a self-portrait. He never reappears. A duality continues in a few paintings of female figures: one upright, the other an agitated collection of human parts and strained boundaries, more or less seated in a chair. Soon, though, he lost interest in the proper figure and began to focus on the earthly mess of motion and flesh represented by the other. In the late 1940s, he discovered that by painting an isolated figure he was able to eliminate “composition, arrangement, relationships, light” and decided that he “might as well stick with the idea that “it’s got two eyes, a nose and mouth and neck.”

De Kooning continued working in both abstract and figurative veins. He pared down the abstractions into first white on black and then black on white calligraphic compositions of line and form compressed into rectangular canvasses. Concurrently, he developed a second Woman series of abstracted figures composited or dissected onto a shifting ground of positive and negative space. Such titles as Black Friday and Judgment Day refer to traditional Christian symbolism. The women sit frontally with breasts exposed; a nod to ubiquitous Madonnas in Renaissance pyramid compositions. The women also recall medieval depictions of sin and corruption. Like the depictions of Luxuria (Lust) at St-Pierre de Moissac, they are decayed, deformed, leaking, and integrated with the corruption of nature.

De Kooning completed his most celebrated paintings in just five years, 1948 to 1953. The period began with a summer residency at Black Mountain College. Other faculty members included John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Buckminster Fuller, and the de Koonings worked with them on the design of a theatrical production. De Kooning focused on a single painting, Asheville, during most of the residency. Here, he integrates figural fragments and what appear to be buildings and avenues in a compressed rectangle of line, color and motion. As in his black and white work, he built the composition by cutting up figural drawings and reassembling the fragments into abstractions, and now bringing jewel-like color back to the mix. Returning to his studio in fall, it suddenly all came together. De Kooning began working on the Woman paintings, continued the black and white abstractions, and soon began one of the largest and most powerful easel paintings of his career.

Excavation is a crucible in which the collaged figural elements seem to melt under intense pressure. There are fragments of Guernica, a ladder, a grin, roofline and skylight and other bits of recognizable imagery, but the elements melt into a seemingly abstract composition. The structure recalls the apocalyptic vision of Pieter Bruegel in The Triumph of Death. According to Elaine de Kooning, when she commented on the similarity, the artist brought out a reproduction of the painting from his work table. De Kooning, in 1951: “I’m not interested in ‘abstracting’ or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more and more things in—drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space.” This painting contains an entire compressed universe.

De Kooning struggled to emerge from under the shadow of Picasso, and then gradually became the oedipal figure for the next generation of artists to admire and slay. In 1953, Rauschenberg asked de Kooning for a drawing to erase, an important drawing that was already Art. Understanding, but not approving of the project, de Kooning gave him a drawing that he (and history) would miss, and that would not easily yield. Over the course of a month and many erasers, the younger artist transformed de Kooning’s drawing into his own Erased de Kooning Drawing.

De Kooning, unvanquished, continued to change and to grow. In fact, many of his works from the mid and late 1950s prefigure Rauschenberg’s flatbed collage and self-conscious dripping paint. In Easter Monday, he used a newspaper transfer as a major compositional element. Although de Kooning denies that the selections have symbolic importance, he carefully applied brushstrokes to preserve the images and text.

In the 1960s de Kooning began to spend more and more time on the coast. He finally moved to the rural East End of Long Island in 1963. His work became more connected to land and sea, calmer, and prettier. Figure, landscape and abstraction merged into pastoral luminosity, with earth tones juxtaposed against garish greens and fleshy pinks.

In a sudden change of direction, in 1969, de Kooning began working in two entirely new mediums: printmaking and sculpture. Never afraid of anachronism, he applied himself to a new body of figurative work using the unfashionable medium of bronze. Shaped from wet clay, the forms retain the marks of their making, recording the squishiness of a malleable and slippery substance. Figural and yet organic, like twisted branches or liquid figures reflected by water, they stand, sit, and straddle the white gallery pedestals. The museum chose to show them frontally, probably due to a lack of space – an entire floor of MoMA was barely enough to hold this life.

The Museum of Modern Art has published a 500-page catalog with essays and reproductions of the entire retrospective exhibition. That catalog is the source of most of the quotations in this review. The de Kooning show runs through Jan. 9 at MoMA. More images and information are available at this page on the MoMA website.