De Kooning Research Articles

The waning of expression

Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko spared themselves the fate of Willem de Kooning. Pollock crashed his car on a deserted country road; Rothko bled himself to death in front of his last canvas. The New York “school” of abstract expressionism flourished in the middle of this century and was renowned for alcoholism and affective disturbance. De Kooning survived all this; now he apparently has Alzheimer's disease, playing out his last years painting wavy lines on what will become expensive artefacts. In many ways his predicament is that of the 20th century …

Willem de Kooning: paintings

One of America's greatest painters, Willem de Kooning is a masterful colourist whose huge canvases are charged with enormous energy. The publication of this beautiful book, which presents eighty of de Kooning's finest paintings and painted works on paper from the early 1940s to the 1980s, coincides with the artist's ninetieth birthday in the spring of 1994. Organized thematically and chronologically, the book focuses on de Kooning's most noteworthy and original painted achievements: portraits from the early 1940s; black-and-white abstractions from 1945 to 1949 that established de Kooning as a leader of the abstract expressionist movement; monumental cityscape paintings from 1949 and 1950; key selections from the notorious Woman series of 1945 to 1954; highway and pastoral landscape abstractions from 1954 to 1960; lush figures in landscapes from 1966 to 1973; landscapes from the 1970s; and later expressive and calligraphic tableaux. Drawing on new archival sources, essays by David Sylvester, Richard Shiff, and Marla Prather reassess de Kooning's critical status, examine his complex and evocative painting techniques, place him in the context of other artists and art movements of his era, and discuss the fundamental impact of his art on subsequent generations. The book serves as the catalogue for a major retrospective of de Kooning's work that will be on exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington from 8 May 1994 to 5 September 1994, the Metropolitan Museum in New York from 6 October 1994 to 8 January 1995, and the Tate Gallery in London from 15 February 1995 to 7 May 1995.

Exhibition Reviews

Judith Zilczer, Lynne Cooke, and Susan Lake, Willem de Kooning from the Hirshhorn Museum Collection; Marla Prather, David Sylvester, and Richard Shiff, Willem de Kooning: Paintings; reviewed by David CateforisDouglas Dreishpoon, Between Transcendence and Brutality, reviewed by Nancy Grove

Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s.

In the wake of World War II, the paintings of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, and other New York School artists participated in a culture-wide initiative to reimagine the self. At a time when widely held beliefs about human nature and the human condition were coming to seem to many commentators increasingly outdated and inadequate, Abstract Expressionism gave compelling visual form to a new subjectivity-a new experience and idea of self. In this original and wide-ranging study, Michael Leja argues that the interest of these artists in tapping primitive and unconscious components of self aligns them with many contemporary essayists, Hollywood filmmakers, journalists, and popular philosophers who were turning, like the artists, to psychology, anthropology, and philosophy in the effort to reformulate individual identity. Taking Pollock's paintings and their reception as a case study, Leja shows that critics located in Pollock's abstract forms a web of metaphors-including spatial entrapment, conflicted production, energy flow, gendered opposition, and unconsciousness-that situated the paintings in mainstream cultural discourses on the individual's sense of self and identity. In this interpretative frame, the cultural and ideological character of the art is illuminated. According to Leja, Abstract Expressionism effectively enacted and represented the new, conflicted, layered subjectivity, a feature that helps to account for the support and interest it garnered from cultural and political institutions alike.

To Paint on Water: The Audiovisual Duet of Complementarity

Concealed within television and today's electronic technology lies a world of untapped potential. Computer colors joined in harmony with offer the composer and the artist alike a precious new amalgam of dynamic art resources. Extraordinary possibilities remain untried, unknown, even barely imaginable. Concealed similarly from public view or understanding, certain painters at the start of this century began developing iconoclastic principles of composition in bold color abstraction, revealing potential forms of expression capable of intimate, feeling. To make color dance was beyond their reach, but despite the fixed nature of oil on canvas, their painterly forms did seem to deal with abstraction in musical ways. Elementary concepts and aspirations of these artists were perhaps first expressed in a few chosen words by pioneer abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky in this excerpt from his earliest letter to Arnold Sch6nberg, dated January 1911: your works, you have realized what I, albeit in uncertain form, have so greatly longed in The independent progress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual voices in your compositions is what I am trying to find in my painting (Crawford 1984). Kandinsky's dream of creating a painter's theory of harmony-color and line for their own sake, like Sch6nberg's radical compositional system of 12 tones, of equal potential-could be identified with many painters thereafter. Each in his or her own way-Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Sam Francis, and many others-without solidarity, and inadvertently, have become members of a unique group. With hindsight, one perceives that, to varying degrees, each artist was devoted to a spiritual or a universal concept of the pure plastic, to the notion of and content at one and the same These terms frequented Mondrian's essays. Such concepts evolved into a long-standing quest what I label today simply a musicalization of Walter Pater declared that all art aspires to the condition of music. Kandinsky wrote that those individual voices in Sch6nberg's were exactly what I am trying to find in my painting. And so too by an ironic inversion of this quest, Alexander Scriabin and perhaps even Sch6nberg himself envisioned a color counterpoint as partner to their musical ideas. In light of the high esteem accorded painters of this epoch, who would care whether or not their particular aspirations toward some kind of musical form actually might be realized through computer arts of motion? Even today, it remains obscure just how any new art (or music) could come from computing machines. Nevertheless, the impulse to deal creatively with and content at one and the same time, to aspire to the condition of music excited the intuitive aspirations of many artists throughout this century. These concepts indeed are about to come to fruition in an altogether different way-dealing with color and tone at one and the same time.

Getting Rid of the Glue: The Music of the New York School

The term New York School is usually applied to a number of American visual artists working in and around Manhattan from the early 1940s through to the late 1950s. The group included abstract expressionists, abstract impressionists and action painters; among its leading lights were Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and Franz Kline. The typical features of New York School art were innovative individual expression and a rejection of past tradition. And while this led to the development of a number of independent styles, rather than a single group style, the overall result was a characteristic American avant-garde approach to art which had much influence internationally.

Stories That Fill the Center

In her provocative writing on the contemporary world, Has Modernism Failed?, critic Suzi Gablik (1984) asserted that postmodernist artists reflect the consumerism more than they challenge it. She attributed this disquieting break with our predecessors to the advance of a bureaucratic, managerial type characterized by mass consumption and economic self-seeking (1984, p. 16). In contrast, she recounted familiar stories artists' presentations that were conceived to subvert our expectations Duchamp's readymades, Rauschenberg's Erased Drawing (of a de Kooning, that required forty erasers and a month erasing to accomplish successfully), and the work a variety conceptual artists. Not yet coopted into the production commodities, such artists manifested their consciousness the increasingly professionally manipulated world, dominated by galleries with their promotional and investment strategies. In doing so, they continued to align themselves with what Kandinsky described as an unconscious protest against materialism, and the demand that everything should have a use and practical value (Gablik, 1984, p. 21). However, they no longer were naive about their dilemma: whether to adopt a singularly individual stance toward making art, sometimes referred to as art for art's sake, or to recognize that any intention to make for society is controlled by the gallery system's dominance public access to art. By the 1970s we were very aware the emergence altemative modes conceptual, antiform, earth, process, body, and performance that Lucy Lippard (1973) chronicled as the dematerialization the object. The impermanence and even immateriality these art objects were conceived to remove them from any possibility being merchandise. As we now know, even these dematerialized works developed a strange magnetic effect, attracting records, notes on scraps paper, journal accounts, photographs, video tapes, and transcripts interviews, a myriad minutiae, the debris and residue these processes that coalesced under the term, documentation, and that could, it turned out, not only be exhibited but also could induce collectors to compete for their possession; with a bit ingenuity this art, too, was incorporated into a market system. Gablik is not arguing for a world in which artists masochistically sacrifice any comfort or even sustenance for the spiritual enrichment others, but she does point out that the impact in our society is severely diminished by the forces professionalism, bureaucracy, and commercialism (p. 56). Artists, themselves, seduced by managerial emblems advancement, begin to think their lives as careers, and careers depend on advertising, promotion, and the manipulations public relations. The inducements increasing economic rewards can trap artists into dependency on the complicated bureaucratic machinery which now organizes and administers the consumption in our culture (p. 56). One result may be that we experience an emptiness at the center: artists in their own lives, centered on nothing but themselves,

Drawing today: draughtsmen in the eighties

has become the pre-eminent tool of both experimental and traditional art. The long-term definition of drawing as marks on paper is now seen as too limiting; it can range from the humblest doodle to monumental land lines. It is the medium used by artists as various as the painter John Walker, the land artist Richard Longt, the one-time minimalist Sol Le Witt and the young figure sculptor Antony Gormley. The last 20 years have witnessed the re-emergence of drawing and its importance to artists: the return to the life room sparked off by the preoccupation of R.B.Kitaj; the legacy of abstraction with the rich achievements of artists such as De Kooning, Twombly, Johns, Marden and Penck; the explosion of work that extended the meaning of drawing and the crucial influence of drawing on the new image painters of the 1980's, most notably Clemente, Paladino, Kiefer and Le Brun. Drawing Today is complemented by an assortment of attractive colour illustrations.

The Hazards and Sources of Writing

The Hazards and Sources of Writing

De Kooning Alone

About 1960, de Kooning dropped from the charts of public sensation in contemporary art. This wouldn't be worth mentioning if de Kooning were a private type of artist, tending his own garden, but he never was. “There is perhaps more Luciferian pride behind de Kooning's ambition than there is behind Picasso's,” Clement Greenberg wrote with mixed feelings in 1953. De Kooning remained the best painter of this half-century, in the opinion of anyone with eyes in a head. He has been the best at any kind of painting, but his particular kind, based in the old European way on mastery of drawing, became uninteresting for people keen to experience the world changing and art changing with it. It was already an old-fashioned kind in terms of Pollock and Rothko. Johns and Rauschenberg didn't even have to think about it if they didn't want to. There is something still drastic, something that hurts, about how de Kooning stopped mattering, unless you don't care about history.

De Kooning's Attitude

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.

Editors' Statement: Willem de Kooning, on His Eighty-Fifth Birthday

This is the year of Willem de Kooning's eighty-fifth birthday, and we have taken great pleasure, at the instigation of the Editorial Board, in putting together this issue of Art Journal to celebrate the event. Recognizing de Kooning as a ne plus ultra among modern masters of the art of painting, we saw the opportunity to express, along with the other contributors, our own personal homage to his genius. As editors, our hunch was that a great many diverse artists and critics had their de Kooning stories to tell, and that proved to be the case.

Long Ago with Willem de Kooning

Only gradually did I realize how much I learned from Edwin Denby and Willem de Kooning, neither of them a teacher.How did Edwin and I meet Bill? In 1935 we lived in a loft on Twenty-First between Sixth and Seventh and one day a black-and-white kitten came through the fire escape. It turned out to belong to Bill and Juliet, who lived next door. Before that, we'd been hearing loud hi-fi music drifting over: Flamenco, Louis Armstrong, Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms. We began visiting. A former girl friend, Nini, came around, too, and they all seemed to get along. I remember Bill saying once, No, he wasn't going to marry Juliet; if he was going to marry anybody it would be Nini.

On de Kooning's Late Style

So concerned has our century been with the forward-looking thrills of youthful innovation that for decades, the late styles of many of our most venerable major and minor masters—from Picasso, Braque, and de Chirico to Chagall and Picabia—have been slighted by indifference or downright insult. But as our century approaches its own frightening sunset years, the mellowness of ripe old age and retrospection have slowly become positive, not negative values. Such thoughts are prompted here by the presentation of an anthology of paintings executed in the three years from 1983 to 1986 by one of our century's oldest living great masters, Willem de Kooning, who, for a long time, tended to be written out of art history after he had scorched his name in it forever with the indelible Woman series of the early 1950s.

Conversations with de Kooning

From 1956 to 1959, I was a sitter (with the title of Manager) at the Tanager Gallery, the first and best known of the artists' cooperatives on Tenth Street. De Kooning lived and worked next door and would drop into the gallery frequently. I also visited him in his studio, and on two occasions (April 25, 1957, and June 16, 1959) interviewed him “formally,” taking down his remarks in longhand (in that pre-tape-recorder era).

Re: De Kooning

There were only three occasions when I had extended moments of contact with de Kooning, and on one of them I was not even present. As much as I admired him and felt honored when, meeting on the sidewalk or in galleries, he would recognize me, I never felt so familiar as to call him “Bill.”

1948

I was so excited about Bill's first show that I quit college. I remember clipping the reproduction of 1948 from a Partisan Review article by a fellow named Greenberg who made rhetorical noises like: Where has this mature artist at the peak of his powers been? My very thoughts as I walked out of Queens College to the dismay of shy mentor, Robert Goldwater. De Kooning didn't teach anywhere but I found the only school, Black Mountain College, whose faculty might be in his circle. Scholarship in hand, I rushed to North Carolina, where I was met with apologies from Josef Albers: famous visiting artist, Mark Tobey, ill—last-minute unknown substitute sought in New York. How did I know instantly that the substitute would be Bill?

On the Sculpture

De Kooning is the latest and I suppose the last of the series of great painters whose occasional work in three dimensions has enriched and even transformed the sculpture of the modern period. As with Daumier, Degas, and Picasso, de Kooning's talent is essentially linear: the figure imaged in painting calls out for its embodiment in sculpture. The implications of graphic suggestion of volume, once realized in clay, take on new power and energy, separate from their source on the flat surface, uninhibited by the sculptor's traditional concern with gravity and structure.

Statements

In 1948, Partisan Review, which seldom included illustrations, did so with photographs of Willem de Kooning's black-and-white paintings from his then-current one-man show, his first in New York City. I think that there was not an accompanying text, although there may have been a piece in that issue by Clement Greenberg-but not about Willem.

The Arts at Black Mountain College.

It was at Black Mountain College that Merce Cunningham formed his dance company, John Cage staged his first happening, and Buckminster Fuller built his first dome. Although it lasted only twenty-four years (1933-1957) and enrolled fewer than 1,200 students, Black Mountain College launched a remarkable number of the artists who spearheaded the avant-garde in America of the 1960s. The faculty included such diverse talents as Anni and Josef Albers, Eric Bentley, Ilya Bolotowsky, Robert Creeley, Willem de Kooning, Robert Duncan, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Goodman, Walter Gropius, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Charles Olson. Among the students were Ruth Asawa, John Chamberlain, Francine du Plessix Gray, Kenneth Noland, Arthur Penn, Robert Rauschenberg, Kenneth Snelson, Cy Twombly, Stan Vanderbeek, and Jose Yglesias.In this definitive account of the arts at Black Mountain College, back in print after many years, Mary Emma Harris describes a unique educational experiment and the artists and writers who conducted it. She replaces the myth of the college as a haphazardly conceived venture with a portrait of a consciously directed liberal arts school that grew out of the progressive education movement. Proceeding chronologically through the four major periods of the college's history, Harris covers every aspect of its extraordinary curriculum in the visual, literary, and performing arts.