De Kooning's Attitude

Abstract

When I was in art school doing geometrical abstractions, I remember Nancy Graves saying, “Of course Rackstraw likes de Kooning, everybody likes de Kooning.” That's about how it was then, and for me his presence has gone on being an inspiration ever since.To anyone who started out in the sixties, American art has been quite preoccupied with theory, both in the way critics look at art and the way artists look to criticism. But de Kooning seems to agree with the tireless aesthetician Valéry that “If aesthetics could really be, art would cease to exist.” This leaves de Kooning unusually civilized and unusually free. To a particular painter whose work didn't interest him, he said “I can't see you.” Such wording allowed that his own mind as well as the painter's work was at issue. “The Cubists went backwards from Cézanne,” he told Harold Rosenberg, and as he developed this thought in the interview, you see how it isn't merely naughty but really alert—a deep idea in a mind that sees nothing as settled or fixed. Criticism that has sought to write off de Kooning after a certain point—the fifties, the forties, whenever—has simply been made from points of view less agile than his own.