Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning was one of the last American artists to have earned the description of “master,” an encomium that rarely has been sought by artists of later generations.
The idea doesn’t seem quite right that De Kooning, who died last month at age 92, should have been the last 20th Century American master, although the more one thinks about it, the harder it is to come up with living painters who might carry his mantle into the new millennium.
The notion of an artist attaining such complete control over a medium that it surpasses everyone else’s is now foreign to esthetic endeavor and indebted to standards of achievement set in Europe during earlier centuries. Hardly anybody measures artists that way anymore, and goals among the artists themselves differ widely.
The Dutch-born De Kooning was, however, of an age, heritage, education and inclination to form his goals in relation to earlier European models and, in that sense, was one of the last artists whose career showed the technical distinction, knowledge of tradition and zeal for exploration that defined mastery during the modern period.
Our intent here is to give visual reminders of De Kooning’s range that may encourage casual museumgoers to see his art firsthand.
Some will be reassured to learn the young De Kooning could create a work as academically sound as the 1921 “Still Life: Bowl, Pitcher and Jug.” Such viewers often need to see how artists represent objects from the verifiable world before they are convinced expressive distortions can be intentional, not the result of an artist’s technical limitations.
Perhaps in the present context the old-fashioned look of “Bowl, Pitcher and Jug” might additionally convey the kind of choice De Kooning often faced. He could repeat the past in his work. Or he could take what he learned from earlier art and create something less safe and rational, something not wholly expected even by himself.
People tend to think this kind of creation involves a break with forebears. Yet it’s always more evolution than revolution. And in a work such as “Seated Man” (circa 1939), De Kooning drew equally from the anatomy of 19th Century Neo-Classicist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and the fragmentation of early 20th Century Cubism to fashion an image of his own time, reflecting the isolation and unease of the Depression.
While painting his series of male figures, De Kooning also worked concurrently on a group of abstractions. He would shift back and forth, from representational to non-representational art. Throughout the 1940s results in both series became ever more agitated in attempts to liberate the unconscious and channel its contents into a direct, spontaneously physical kind of mark-making.
The apotheosis was “Excavation” (1950), a large, violent maelstrom of interlocked forms that is abstract but through paint application alone seems to convey something troubling about human experience. The high proportion of white to shards of red, yellow, blue and pink is only one factor that intensifies the conflict.
Photographic reproductions, because they do not capture the artist’s touch in three dimensions, cannot convey the force of “Excavation” and the best of De Kooning’s later paintings. Force resides less in their pattern than in how slashes and splatters set it down. Think of painters working in small strokes from the wrist; then imagine the sweep of an entire arm. This broad scythe-like gesture, even when stopped short, went beyond the strength of a hand, introducing the more complete (and complex) physicality of the body. The epic scale of the physicality gave De Kooning a label that would stick in decades to come: heroic.
Lesser artists might have continued in the vein of “Excavation.” Instead, De Kooning returned to the human figure-which admirers took as a betrayal. For the next two years, he worked on “Woman I” (1950-52), retraining the force of his gestures and touch on a image that, like the earlier male series, summed up something in contemporary culture.
De Kooning’s “Woman” canvases seemed to represent a collision of the 1950s oversentimentalization of motherhood and the Hollywood Bitch Goddess; they were arguably the strongest of all his paintings. But, again, he turned away, recasting his art by gradually having landscapes subsume the figure and drain away violence into lyricism. “Door to the River” (1960) is like a snapshot that focuses on a detail in a landscape, quickly catching the essence behind the topography, not at all simple considering “Door” is abstract.
The lightness and fizz of the best ’60s landscapes evaporated when De Kooning shifted back once more to paintings of women. At that moment he ceased being quite as vital to artists who sought a ferociously authentic, intuitive kind of mark-making that grew from the life of an artist rather than the ironies of pop culture or the overintellectualizing of the academy.
The bravura of De Kooning’s ’70s abstract landscapes, such as “Untitled V” (1977), brought some of the disciples back along with many young converts who made up an International Neo-Expressionist Brotherhood during nearly all of the next decade. It was a scene worthy of allegory: White-haired Experience leading a riotous band of Innocents. Yet most of the ’80s crashing and flailing had none of De Kooning’s cardinal virtue, sincerity; and even the master who had sailed so confidently into works such as the creamily serene “Untitled III” (1981) had by mid-decade faltered.
There was no recovery-the artist sank ever deeper into the mental deterioration of Alzheimer’s disease, robbing historians who love the neatness of a “late style.” De Kooning, on the other hand, loved to confound historians with unfinished business. That he achieved mastery amid so many shifts and loose ends is one of the joys in a sober, cruel century.
