Painting's Vocabulary Builder

By ROBERT HUGHES

A founder of abstract expressionism honored at the Whitney

Willem de Kooning will be 80 in April. To have reached such an age, still bravely painting, is to have outlived all one's enemies and most of one's friends; by now his reputation can hardly be diminished, which may be why the Whitney Museum has had no choice but to enlarge it a little more. If de Kooning is not quite an American Picasso, at least he has been in every art history book, and in the mind of every artist, for the past 30 years. His career started late--he did not even have a one-man show until he was 43--but it proved durable. So although the exhibition of more than 250 of his paintings, drawings and bronzes that opened in December at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art is the largest de Kooning retrospective ever held (it will travel to Berlin and Paris), it is still a provisional report.

As a retrospective, this show is by no means "definitive." Quite a few key works are absent. The Art Institute of Chicago refused to lend Excavation, 1950, the biggest and most ambitious of de Kooning's biomorphic abstractions, while from the celebrated Women series of the early '50s, those shark-grinning popsies before whose dumpy and threatening torsos so much critical rhapsody has been laid, three of the main paintings (owned by Australia, Iran and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City) are missing. Nor do we get to see Police Gazette, 1954-55, or Gotham News, 1955-56, the impacted, jostling city paintings that initiated de Kooning's bravura landscapes of the late '50s. With these and other gaps, one gets a less than full picture of the artist at his best, up to his 60th year. By the time the show gets to Europe and other early works have dropped out, it will be patchier still; a pity, since the Whitney plainly wants the show to revise art history with a bang, installing de Kooning in Pollock's place as the central hero of abstract expressionism.

"More than any other American artist of the 20th century," writes its director, Tom Armstrong, in the catalogue, "Willem de Kooning has added to the vocabulary of painting, altered the perception of what painting represents." Jorn Merkert's catalogue essay asserts that de Kooning "played perhaps the decisive role" in the development of abstract expressionism (notwithstanding de Kooning's own generous tribute to Pollock as the one who "broke the ice"). The purpose of canonization is well in hand; once again--though one must except Curator Paul Cummings' measured and enlightening essay on de Kooning's drawings--the work of a distinguished artist becomes a pedestal for the display of swollen claims.

Perhaps it is not in the holiday spirit to feel that this oeuvre has any faults or limitations at all. But it does; what serious painter's does not? Their nature can be assessed by comparing the "early" with the "late" de Kooning. When the slight, pale Dutch youth smuggled himself into America without proper papers in 1926, he brought with him something that very few of his colleagues in the New York School of the '40s and '50s would turn out to have: a thorough, guild-based art training that centered on formal drawing of the figure.

His early portraits--whether in pencil, like the exquisite study of Elaine de Kooning, Portrait of Elaine, circa 1940-41, or in oil--thus tended to consolidate an unerring density of structure beneath their tentative-looking, close-toned surfaces; all nuance and doubt on top (often de Kooning, like Arshile Gorky, could not bring himself to give the final form to a hand or the side of a face, leaving it a worried blur), they were iron below. It was de Kooning's draftsmanship that enabled him to fix his parings from other artists--from Gorky, John Graham and, above all, Picasso--to a firm core. One can cite the Picassoan acquisitions in Seated Woman, circa 1940 | (the hair from Dora Maar, the breasts and calves from Marie-Therese Walter), but the drawing, the rhythm, the sense of interval and structure are already de Kooning's own, and they have a strong 3 classical bias, fixed by a long study of Ingres. (The shoulders of Ingres's women, rising in sublime lunar complacency from their Empire decolletages or, naked, from the Turkish tiles, had much to do with de Kooning's syntax then.) The result was that the very paintings that secured de Kooning's reputation as a key figure in abstract expressionism, a painter hardly less "radical" than Pollock, were grounded in classical prototype and practice: if his paintings of the decade 1945-55 looked a mile forward, they also looked two miles back. Their inherent structure had nothing to do with German or any other kind of modernist expressionism. It was closer to cubism, but with the turning and flickering of cubist shape given a jostling density, almost literally made flesh: a shallow grid torn and reconstituted by the wristy, virile, probing action of de Kooning's line. His two near monochrome abstractions at the end of the decade, Attic, 1949, and Excavation, invoke the body without depicting it.

They seem packed with elbows, thighs and groins, but these images--which, in the hands of a mere surrealist-minded painter, could have turned the surface into a charnel house--are sublimated by de Kooning's classical instincts to a generalized sense of the body that matches, in a terse way, the muscular rakings of his brush.

If Excavation and Attic were perhaps the greatest paintings of de Kooning's long career, the best known are certainly the Women. De Kooning has always been obsessed, as a painter, with the bodies of women, quoting them in whole and in detail, with a unique mingling of distance, intimacy, lust, humor and spite. In them, the billowy amplitude of Rubens' flesh is sometimes reborn, along with the sardonic affection Reginald Marsh felt for his Coney Island cuties. But the women of the early '50s are his canonical ones--part archaic Ishtar, part Amsterdam hooker and part Marilyn. Their most menacing attribute is their smile, originally cut from a LIFE magazine ad and stuck on; in Woman and Bicycle, 1952-53, there are two smiles, one where it should be, the other arranged like a necklace of teeth around the throat. With such paintings de Kooning brought off the near impossible joining of expressionist archaism with pop-style '50s femininity.

The Women may lack the formal rigor of the paintings that precede them, but they delve so far into American attitudes toward the beautiful and the banal that their vitality as signs has not abated in 30 years.

The big change in de Kooning's work came after 1960, when he left New York City for Long Island--that flat tongue of potato field, windmill and scrub, arched with dazzling air, that had already reminded generations of artists of his native Holland. His paintings became more candied and atmospheric; the scored, horny surfaces of the city images gave way to a spreading lushness; his syntax weakened as loose "expressive" effects of buttery, foamy pigment drowned the old rigor of his drawing. One constantly expects something "major" to emerge from their rhetoric: the intimations of erotic violence, the spraddled, froggy postures, the weird pull between cruel figuration and sweet sunny color.

Painted passage after passage reminds one that the old cunning of the hand remains, though often in abeyance--the "touch," like perfect natural pitch in singers, for which de Kooning is justly famous and on which his whole sense of drawing is predicated. Sometimes a whole painting will recover the former lyrical intensity: one is Pirate, 1981, with its airy, pink-and-gold surface of flesh and cloud. But there is a lot of banality and self-parody, conscious or not, between such works, especially in the sculpture, which gets worked to a haptic frenzy of surface without conveying the least energy as form, its bonelessness mimicking the lack of structure in the paintings.

Naturally, the show's curators do not share this view. Argument about late de Kooning has always been influenced by weather reports, and its etiquette demands that the painter be treated as Hurricane Willem. Merkert's essay offers some real plums of this kind. "The creative force of eros... has merged with the flux of a shapeless magma of light and unbound matter drifting toward congealment into form. Mists and gases obscure these happenings ..." Indeed they do, and the figure in this neo-Bayreuthian murk is der fliegende Hollander himself, scudding before the oratorical wind. It is myth that prompts such language, a myth now swollen to the point where one is ex pected to see de Kooning not just as a re markable and even an occasionally great painter, but as a primal force of cul ture whose actions accumulate rele-Ivance with each passing day. Can it I be only 15 years since Hilton Kramer DEG was assuring the readers of the New | York Times that "the issue of i Mr. de Kooning's influence is now a dead issue"?

What happened between, of course, was neoexpressionism. Just as his paintings of the '50s were zeal ously imitated from Tenth Street to Sydney (and as zealously stomped by minimalist and Greenbergian alike in the '60s and '70s), so his late work becomes the adopted parent of the "new Fauves." It will seem even more so when this show, shorn of most of the crucial de Koonings prior to 1960, arrives in Berlin.

Undoubtedly, this will give the late paintings (perhaps even the sculp ture) a thicker rhetorical coating. But it will not make them any better than they are.

-- By Robert Hughes