The Painter as Draftsman

By ROBERT HUGHES

That sly, unpredictable and difficult old Dutch master of abstract expressionism, Willem de Kooning, turned 70 this year. Ever since the '40s it has been De Kooning's fate, as Harold Rosenberg once observed, to be considered in decline; almost every change in his art, from the Women series of 1951 to the gnarled, glowering bronze figures that occupy him now, has been greeted as a retreat from some previous aesthetic win. Embracing contradictions, De Kooning refuses to be typecast. "I think," he declared in 1949, "it is the most bourgeois idea to think one can make a style beforehand. To desire to make a style is to apologize for one's own anxiety." It is a suitable epigraph for his whole career.

Whatever the changes of direction and emphasis, some of De Kooning's qualities have remained constant. One of them is a power of draftsmanship that though it falters now and then, is at its best unequaled among living American artists. This and the recent sculpture (TIME, Oct. 23, 1972) are celebrated in a show of 126 drawings and pastels and 25 bronzes, organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which opened last week at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. It will later be seen at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

De Kooning is a traditional kind of draftsman, and his work with pencil or crayon always pursues an active, symbiotic relationship with his paintings. Drawing explores and refines but does not quite fix an inventory of shapes that eventually find their way onto the canvas. It is a way of keeping the choices open by profuse addition. Now this process of working from drawings into paintings was not much to the fore in abstract expressionism. For Pollock to do a preliminary sketch for one of his drip paintings would have subverted their aesthetic intent, since the web of form depended on the fluid, spontaneous and unrepeatable movements of the hand. De Kooning--and to some extent Robert Motherwell --are the only surviving abstract expressionist painters in whose work the preliminary study does play a big role. In both cases, drawing is linked to collage and the shifting and superimposition of forms en bloc.

"He will do drawings," wrote De Kooning's friend and biographer, Critic Thomas B. Hess, "on transparent tracing paper, scatter them one on top of the other, study the composite drawing that appears on top, make a drawing from this, reverse it, tear it in half, and put it on top of still another drawing." What this show indicates most clearly about De Kooning's enormous output as draftsman is that he managed to synthesize the painstaking approach to drawing that he learned as an art student in Rotterdam with the demands of spontaneity, which, by temperament, he deeply felt. This brilliant resolution now seems to be one of the coupling points at which the continuity between past art and modernism shows itself.

One of the paradoxes about De Kooning the draftsman is that his pencil, in movement, is always describing contour, even though the shapes one infers from the contours are rarely closed or fixed. His early pencil portrait drawings from 1940-41, done 15 years after he smuggled himself into America, are manifestly homages to Ingres--or, more precisely, to Ingres as filtered through Picasso. But that sense of exact and probing contour was not dissipated by De Kooning's progressive moves toward abstraction. Instead, it was reinforced. The line in Abstraction, circa 1945, knows exactly where it is going and what it is doing; for all their improvised quality, his arabesques and scribbles record a certainty about shape that could only have been grounded in prolonged discipline. This is even more discernible in the suite of pastels and charcoals that De Kooning made in the early '50s in his vast and ramifying studio at Springs, L.I., to extend and clarify his best-known series of paintings: the Women.

Teeth in the T-Zone. The Women paintings are bathed in influences -- 1930s Picassos and 1950s cigarette ads (that smile was originally a Camel "T-zone" clipped from a back cover of TIME), Cycladic sculpture and Mesopotamian idols, the "archaic smile" distorted into a toothy leer. They are also drenched in evocative rhetoric about monstrous, insatiable female deities. The Women have been compared, severally and together, to the destroying Kali, to Robert Graves' White Goddess, to Alban Berg's Lulu, to Lilith and Marlene and Marilyn and Mona Lisa. Now obviously these drawings do have their demonic aspect -- the air of Woman, circa 1951, with her staring black pupils, bared teeth and cuirass-like breasts, testifies to that; they are not just formal exercises. It certainly seems that De Kooning finds it hard to imagine women in other than two aspects: either the cas-tratrix or the pink, spraddling floozy who flounders dumbly around the Long Island shore line in his latest works.

But the old shock value of the Women, as imagery, has receded. As Philip Larson points out in his catalogue introduction to the show, "The generalized woman-image becomes a 'given' in De Kooning's art, allowing the artist to proceed immediately to the essential business of making a picture." The Women series, as the drawing made circa 1952 immediately makes clear, contained that private neurological signature known as style: the capacious, whipping curves of breast and thigh, the brisk L of the arm responding to the angles of the chair legs, the shallow, vigorous flurry of space and line around the vestiges of a head. With De Kooning, the energy and propulsion of the line tend to abolish the usual distinctions between painting and drawing; line turns out to be equal to brush mark in its power to suggest density, friction, displacement, tactility and all the other signs by which we recognize the life of forms. It seems likely that in the future, De Kooning's originality as a draftsman will be seen to reside in his power to cross the bound aries of category and process: painting as drawing as painting.

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