DESIRE AT FULL STRETCH

By ROBERT HUGHES

When Willem de Kooning died last week at the age of 92, it did not come as a surprise; he had succumbed to senile dementia years before, and a sort of deathwatch had settled over the art world as it observed, at a distance, the slow sinking of the last Abstract Expressionist. Now they were all definitively gone, the artists who put American art on the world map after 1945: Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and the transplanted Dutchman who jumped ship into the New World in 1926 and settled in New York as an illegal alien. Fortunately for American art, the immigration officials never caught up with de Kooning.

He was born and raised in Rotterdam, where his father Leendert de Kooning was a liquor distributor and his mother Cornelia Nobel--reputedly a woman of fearsome toughness--ran a sailors' bar on the waterfront. He studied at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts in the 1920s. It often used to be said that de Kooning got an extensive training in classical draftsmanship there. This wasn't true. What he wanted to be was a commercial artist, an illustrator--to do the kinds of illustrations he had seen in American magazines.

This early background helps explain the irrepressible fondness for popular culture--cigarette ads, Marilyns and so forth--that kept surfacing in his work in the 1950s, to the annoyance of some American critics. De Kooning was never a "pure" artist, partly because he was not trained to be one. But that was what enabled him to connect with America in a way few avant-garde painters had. He loved the lushness, the grittiness, the obtrusive weirdness of American cultural vernaculars. Though by the end of the '50s, laden with celebrity, he had become the man for younger artists to beat, it is impossible to imagine Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and some of the younger Pop artists developing their visions except in response to his, or to disentangle their revolt against his gestural, richly inflected touch from their homage to it.

All art builds on earlier art, de Kooning's no less than most. Part of its strength was in its rootedness. The big senior influences on his early American work were Ingres, Miro and Picasso--and among his contemporaries, the tragically fated Gorky, who would kill himself in 1948. "I am glad that it is about impossible to get away from his powerful influence," de Kooning wrote soon af-ter Gorky's death, and the Armenian painter's recurved, taut line, describing edge and implying volume in a single gesture, was preserved in the Dutchman's work. In fact, de Kooning's filial relation to Gorky resembled one played out in American art a century before: that of Frederic Church, the great landscapist, to his teacher Thomas Cole.

De Kooning, however, was inherently a corporeal artist. His best work had a wonderful libidinousness, a way of using the body of paint to access and encompass the body of the world. To call it abstract, even when it was most so, is to ignore this. In what was probably his finest painting, Excavation, 1950, one sees desire at full stretch: every form carries its physical freight--elbow, groin, folded belly, thigh, slipping and jostling in the paint as though mud wrestling in pigment. De Kooning could find metaphors of energy that none of his contemporaries could rival. And when he carried his "impurity" beyond the decorum of abstraction, as in the great women of the early to mid-'50s, he produced some extraordinarily intense images--funny, monstrous and laden with anxiety, rendered with a kind of desperate verve. "I find I can paint pretty young girls," he remarked, "yet when it is finished I always find they are not there, only their mothers"--more likely his own mother Cornelia, that coarse dockland sibyl.

It would be hard to pretend that de Kooning's output in the '60s and '70s, after he moved to East Hampton, on Long Island, measured up to the qualities of this earlier work, although his reputation by then had grown to near mythic proportions. (So did his prices: in 1989, just before the great art-market bubble burst, $20.1 million was paid at auction for a 1955 painting, Interchange.) De Kooning was a tough bird, but no talent could have been unaffected by the scale of his alcoholic bouts, and the suds-and-mayonnaise color and scatty marking of his later work are in sharp contrast to the fierce, free concision of the earlier. Most problematic of all, naturally, are the paintings--currently on view at New York City's Museum of Modern Art--that were done in the '80s, after his mind was completely gone and he had to rely on assistants to do everything but move his arm across the canvas. These spectral, vacuous confections of ribbony paint are among the saddest things ever made by a once major artist.

Still, not even they can detract from the brilliant achievements of de Kooning's earlier years. An American Picasso? Surely not. But there was no European de Kooning either.