Excavation (1950), The Art Institute of Chicago
I got up early Saturday morning to go to MoMA to catch the members-only viewing (a perk for members that lets you see a show when there aren’t so many people around) of the Willem de Kooning retrospective. Organized by John Elderfield, chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture at MoMA, the exhibition runs through January 9, 2012; the show does not travel.
The critic Clement Greenberg confidently asserted that because Jackson Pollock, the most famous of the abstract expressionist painters, revolutionized pictorial space, he was the greatest painter of the second half of the 20th century. Frankly, I’ve never bothered to question this proposition. Yet after seeing the de Kooning retrospective, I don’t really give a lick how revolutionary Pollock was. He was not as great—in terms of painting qua painting—as de Kooning.
Although there have been multiple de Kooning shows over the last half-century, there’s never before been a survey of de Kooning’s entire oeuvre. This blockbuster exhibition (the lines outside the museum were already long when I left at 11 a.m.) covers seven decades of the artist’s life. It starts off with examples of de Kooning’s astonishingly precocious talent at realism—two small still lifes done when he was 12 and 16—and culminates in his last pictures, made at the end of his life (he died in 1997), when he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and the paintings are mostly white with a few ribbons of color staggering across the picture plane. With over 200 works, the exhibition occupies the entire sixth floor of MoMA. That’s 17,000 square feet of gallery space.
Abstract expressionist painters who fall into the category of “action painting,” like Pollock and de Kooning, were known for being “one with the paint.” Their paint landed on their pictures, of course, but it also splattered across the walls, the floor, the table, their clothes, and their hands, face, arms and feet. While Pollock developed a bent-over, dance-like motion to lay down multiple skeins of paint onto canvases lying on the floor, de Kooning stood up and back before lunging, writing the book on spontaneous gesture painting. He had a way of seemingly tossing off the most fluid, delicate lines, bold brushstrokes, and violently dabbed marks.
Yes, de Kooning slathered paint around, but no, your 3-year-old could not do it this way. For slathering the paint was only the beginning. De Kooning’s paintings, which bridge abstraction and figuration, are built on an underlying, unseen, implied grid that always keeps a lid on his dangerously free lines and brush strokes. Everything in a de Kooning painting is built from scratch and then scraped down to the point where only a few fragments remain, again and again, sometimes hundreds of times. The nuances in de Kooning’s line explain why his line achieves the expansiveness of form. By drawing on top of already painted surfaces, and sometimes impulsively pressing down newspaper onto wet paint and then pulling it up to leave behind the accident of reverse type ink marks, de Kooning opened up a whole new territory for painters to explore. Pollock may have been the more revolutionary, but his drip offered nothing but an end game.
Like other abstract expressionists, de Kooning believed in the accident. Chance events in paint weren’t enough, however. Deeply aware that paint can turn into chaos, he’d gainsay his efforts by repeatedly scraping them down before building them back up again. The artist remarked that he saw no difference between abstraction and figuration. No wonder, since the purpose of making a painting, as he saw it, was to discover meaning by wrestling with the medium of paint itself.
Many influences lurk in the work—Picasso, Matisse, Gorky, School of Paris contour-driven painting, surrealism, American toothpaste ads (those toothy mouths in his Women paintings). Yet de Kooning was no synthesizer. He brazenly pushed forward, giving paint enough leash to become its own actor out discovering its own boundaries. His hunt was for nothing less than to make a painting express the ineffable, terrible awe of existence itself.
In trying to explain away the misogyny in de Kooning’s many Women paintings, a wall plaque noted that de Kooning “likened paint to flesh.” Likened? Better yet, “equated.” Like Picasso (and before him, Cézanne), de Kooning was fascinated by Honoré de Balzac’s story, “The Unknown Masterpiece” (1837). The story, a “fable” with a moral message, recounts the struggle of the fictional painter Frenhofer who, in his quest to achieve in paint the perfection and roundness of nature, ends up falling down the painter’s hell of perpetually destroying whatever it is he’s just painted.
While it’s true that artists striving for perfection possess artistic hubris, their need for perfection tortures them. The more perfectionist the artist, the more he or she can never complete a work of art because nothing is ever right or good enough. Part of being a painter—perhaps even that which explains the greatest, most brilliant art—rests in knowing precisely when it’s time to stop.
I’ve always preferred de Kooning’s abstract work (like Excavation, owned by the Art Institute of Chicago), but precisely because of their misogyny, felt repelled by his Women paintings. De Kooning’s women combine humorous discombobulation, wicked sexual depravity and utter horror. They’re terrifying. I still haven’t a clue what they indicate about the psyche of such a devilishly handsome man. He was a notorious womanizer, but then again, it was hardly his fault. Women were continually throwing themselves at him.
But though his Women paintings consist of chopped-up vicious vamps, and men ought not to do such things to women, I found I didn’t care this time around. They also evoke the wild, Dionysian, terrifying, highly charged sexual side to existence, an inner beast lurking in all of us that rebels against another kind of terror altogether—the terror of bourgeois existence.
For a walk on the wild side, brave the crowds and see this show. It takes your breath away.
