Seeing the Face in the Fire

By ROBERT HUGHES

Willem de Kooning, whom many would call America's greatest living painter, was 43 when he had his first one-man show and today, at 90, with his painting career finished by senility, he has still not had an adequate museum retrospective. The last attempt at such a show was staged at the Whitney Museum in New York City 10 years ago. It was a bust because so many of De Kooning's key paintings from the '40s and '50s were not lent. The show titled "Willem de Kooning Paintings," which opened this month at the National Gallery in Washington -- it will go to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in October, and later to the Tate Gallery in London -- is not a real retrospective either. It leaves out both the worst of De Kooning, his sculpture, and some of the best, his drawings. But it does have quite a few of the paintings that were missing from the effort 10 years ago and is certainly a must-see for that reason.

De Kooning is probably the most libidinal painter America has ever had. One sees him as the consummate anti-Duchamp, a permanent relief from over- theorized art, a man so in touch with the sources of his pictorial pleasure (the body of paint and the body of the world) that he can render you dizzy with exhilaration. This isn't dumbness but a particular form of sensory intelligence that has always been rare in American art and came, in this case, from outside it. De Kooning arrived in the U.S. as an illegal immigrant from Rotterdam in 1926. He was a gifted draftsman who had already achieved a high level of academic training. But he gradually learned to connect that to a modernist syntax, fusing the line of Ingres and the fragmentation of the antique torso to 1930s Picasso and his American derivatives like Arshile Gorky. Seated Figure (Classic Male), 1940, shows the early stage of this process to perfection. The forms through which De Kooning reached abstraction were always connected to an earlier kind of abstraction, that of academic drawing.

If one were forced to pick the best single picture De Kooning ever painted, it would probably have to be Excavation, 1950: that tangled, not-quite monochrome, dirty-cream image of -- what? Bodies is the short answer: every one of the countless forms that seem embedded in the paint, jostling and slipping against one another in a tempo that seems to get faster toward the corners, can be read as an elbow, a thigh, a buttock, but never quite literally. There is even a set of floating teeth -- the dentures the Women would soon be sporting.

De Kooning's characteristically hooked, recurving line takes on an invigorating speed, charging and skidding through the dense paint, slits open with the promise of spatial depth, only to shut again. The only relief from the close churning of forms is a curious "window" at the middle of the painting -- red, white and blue -- that looks like a blurred American flag. The work's space is not deep, as the title might suggest, but shallow, like a bas-relief. You keep expecting the image to fly apart into formal incoherence, but it never does: it has the kind of control you see in great drivers or skaters, a supple rigor that seems to exist only on the edge of its own dissolution. One is tempted to say that Excavation is the last great Cubist painting, 30 years after Cubism petered out. All of De Kooning's relation to Picasso is in it.

Marla Prather's catalog essay provides the intriguing gloss that the genesis of Excavation began with a black-and-white film, Bitter Rice, a classic of Italian neorealist cinema, starring Silvana Mangano as a rice gatherer in the Po Delta; evidently De Kooning "responded" (as what red-blooded Dutch- American artist of 46 might not?) to a sequence of peasant women in tight shorts mud-wrestling in the paddies. If true, this tale illustrates clearly how De Kooning never conceived of painting as a purely Apollonian art: fragments of pop culture -- movies, ads, the immense bric-a-brac of the American desire industry -- were always sailing into his images and sticking there, like bugs on a windshield.

The extreme "reductionist" view of De Kooning's career, held by Clement Greenberg and maintained by some critics today, is that after 1950 it went kerflooie. Like Western civilization itself, as his friend and chief critical promoter Harold Rosenberg sardonically remarked, De Kooning was always in decline. This katabasis is supposed to have begun in the early '50s, with the Women series. Greenberg is said to have opined to De Kooning that at this juncture in history (meaning 40 years ago), you can't paint a human face. Sure, said the painter, and you can't not paint one either -- meaning, by this laconic koan, that no matter how abstract you get, people will always tend to read images in the work, like seeing faces in the fire. So why not come right out with the figure? At least it might save the abstractions from gliding into decoration, losing their crankiness and urgency, which was, indeed, what New York abstract painting did when lyric acrylic on unprimed duck became all the rage in the 1960s.

Abstract Expressionism -- in the hands of its two masters, Pollock and De Kooning, at least -- had a way of disappointing the critics who wanted it to be more abstract than it was. Just as Pollock's all-over paintings wouldn't be so great if they weren't landscapes, full of wind and weather, light and pollen, so De Kooning's work benefited from the grand ghosts of Dutch baroque figure painting, who kept jolting the artist's elbow.

* The pupils of Woman I, 1950-1952, glare at you like a pair of black head lamps. She has the worst overbite in all of Western art. She looks like a school matron, seen in a bad dream, imposing and commonplace, and full of a power that flows from the slashing brushstrokes into the body. De Kooning -- the "slipping glimpser," as he called himself, open to a constant stream of momentary impressions -- loved contradictory vernaculars, visual slang that collided with the huge amount of high-art language that he had internalized since his student days in the Dutch academy. Smiles from Camel ads; shoulders from Ingres; pinup girls and Raphael's The School of Athens; high and low, everywhere. It was his mode of reception, never intellectualized but often extremely funny.

By the late 1950s, De Kooning was surrounded by imitators; there was a "look," a gestural rhetoric fatally easy to mimic, that they got from him and reduced to parody. (The artists who would really make something of his legacy were not in New York but in California: Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud.) Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns reacted against him, sons against the parent; but Rauschenberg's now classic Oedipal gesture of rubbing out a De Kooning drawing could not erase the obvious fact that the paint in his combine-pictures came straight out of the older Dutch master, drips, clots and all.

Such things make an artist feel old. As his followers were becoming more prominent, De Kooning was easing himself out of Manhattan, spending more and more time on the South Fork of Long Island. The flat potato fields, beaches and glittering air of that tongue of land must often have reminded him of the Dutch seacoast, but what mattered most to his paintings in the late '50s was the experience of getting there, being driven up Route 495 -- fast movement through unscrolling American highway space. Hence the road images of 1957-1958, in which the full-reach, broad-brush speed of the paint becomes a headlong road movie, analogous to Jack Kerouac's writing (though without its hectoring blither) or the photographs of De Kooning's friend Robert Frank. See America now! And you do -- in abstraction; you feel its rush and tonic vitality in the toppling blue strokes of Ruth's Zowie, 1957, which echo Franz Kline's big-girder structures but move them into a pastoral context.

What De Kooning found at the end of this highway, however, when he moved permanently to Long Island in 1963, was mostly suds and mayonnaise. The long $ series of pink squidgy pictures -- landscapes, nudes splayed like frogs in memory of Dubuffet, and female clam diggers -- that issued from his studio over the next 15 years was lush and trivial. The drawing is submerged in weak, declamatory, wambling brushstrokes; the color -- mostly pink -- is bright and boring. Yet you could never write De Kooning off. He came back in the late '70s with some big, rapturously congested landscape-body images with a deeper tonal structure that, though they do not support the comparisons to late Monet, Renoir, Bonnard "and, of course, Titian" that David Sylvester makes in his catalog essay, certainly confirm that the movement of De Kooning's talent was not on-off, but ebb and flow.

Then came the thin, pale, intensely lyrical paintings of the early '80s, which spin away the congestion altogether, and for a few years recapitulate the graphic intensity of his work in the 1940s, but in terms of an almost Chinese delicacy, in the colors of famille-rose porcelain. Looking at them is like seeing an old man's veins through his skin: the abiding network of the style is set forth, but in its last physical form.