FINE ARTS

Hallelujah Painting: Willem de Kooning

By LEO J. O ' D O N O V A N

HOUGH SCARCELY ACCORDED the highest rank in the pantheon of art. America has neverthcles.s had its share of artistic accomplishment and recogniiiun. The expatriate Pennsyivanian Benjatnin West succeeded Joshua Reynolds as the second president of the prestigiou.s Royal Academy in London, and Jnhn Singlelon Copley was admired as much in England as in its colonies. John Wilmerding's "American Light" exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in 1981 showed that the so-called Atnerican lumitiists, following the earlier example of Thomas Cole and inspired by their nation's land and its light, created some of the inosi memorable canvases of the rnid-I'tth century anywhere. In the l880's and yO's, Albert Pinkham Ryder's mystic pantheism and George Inness' evocative landscapes rightly claimed an international renown. Both the publie at ~"^ large and critics alike have accorded Winsk'w Homer a high place in the history of art, while Thomas Eakins probably deserves more than any other painter the title of our finest artist. American impressionists may not have achieved Ihe level of their European counterparts, but William Merritt Chase, Mary Cassatt and Childe Hassam continue to be shown in their company. John Singer Sargent is a special case, his entire oeuvre winning the highest admiration from some, while others regret what they consider the commercialization of his great early talent as he became a hugely successful portrait painter in England. Eariy in the 2th centu17. American realists of the Ash Can school such as John Sloan. Robert Henri. George LEO J. O'DONOVAN, S.J., is president of Georgetown University.

connection to traditional representation. In Pollock it had its purest example of an emotional, all-over painting in which the tmal works sought to incorporate as much as possible the .sense of the actual ereaiive process of painting ("action painting" was the title given it by Harold Rosenberg in 1^52). In their work. Anshile Gorky and Franz Kline developed personal interpretations of abstraction in mystical and dramatic displays of elegant calligraphy or in larger. slashing forms. Barnett Newman reduced his formal vixrabulary to stark, boldly fiimplified geometric lorms. representin-^ spiritual essences, and rendered them on often luseiously huge panels. Mark Rothko pressed his floating ields of color, seeking communion with each other. 10 their ultmale extremity in the increasingly Jark canvases that preceded his ^uicide. Woman!, 1950-1952 OW. through a marvelously comprehensive and spaciously hung exhibition at ttte National Gallery of Art in Washington, we have an opportunity to consider whether, as many have thought, de K^ning is the most enduring and fertile member uf the school. More selective than the sprawling Whitney show 1) years ago and more representative than the Hirshhom's idiosyncratic presentation last fall, "Willem de Kixming Paintings" gathers 76 paintings from a career of almost 50 years, Belore ihem. it is almosl imixissiblc not tc use the tenn "Dutch Master." Bom in Rotterdam on April 24. 19(14, de Kooning began studies at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Ails and Techniques at the age of 12. acquiring a proficiency in draftsmanship, perspective and anatomy that was unique among his .subsequent colleagues. He was smuggled into Htiboken by Dutch sailors in 1926 and moved to

Bellows and William Glackens developed a style that commands more attention now thai 20th-centur) painting is less nanowly identified with the French school. Amt rican preeisionism and the abstractions of Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley were botli distinctively American and distinctively modern, while Stuart Davis's amtizingly en alive Americanization of cubism continues to persuade some of tis of his major status. But it was not until the years immediately after World War [I that a group of young painters in New York emergtd as such a vital and dominant foree that they became the new center of the art world. The New York sehool. led by Jac^ison Pollock and Willem de Kooning, sudtlenly attracted international attention w th a vibrant, dramatically expressive abstractionism, derived from European abstract sutrealism. that retained only the slimmest

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New York the next year, working in various jobs as a house painter, carpenter and commercial artist. Fired from the Federal Art Project of the W.P.A. in 1936, he moved towards becoming a full-time artist. In New York he became close to Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky and John Graham, who included him among the best young American painters in his influential "System and Dialectics of Art" (1937).

black and white webs. Before "Attic" (1940) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. for example, with its several gaping heads, one may feel a host of hoarded memories from a part of one's house seldom visitedor else the eariy struggle for form in ancient Greece. "Black Friday" (1948). on the other hand, conveys a mood of gravity, lightened by elegant drawing

1 HE FIRST PAINTINGS in the present exhibition, from the years 1938 to 1944. are of male and female figures, and they suggest immediately some of the artist's greatest strengths: command of line, inventive color, technical and formal creativity, an uncanny ability to communicate emotional dislocation and turbulence. "Standing Man" (c. 1942) evokes Matisse's abstract figures of the pre-World War I years, while "Seated Figure (Classic Male)" (!940) recalls Picasso's Saltimbanques ___^ as well as his neoclassical paintings of the l920's. But only de Kooning would leave such lovely early lines of drawing in place, painted over with later forms rendered in soft pink or beige and articulated not primarily by anatomy but by feeling. The female figures here are more vividly, even garishly, painted, mixing chartreuse yellows, lime greens, pinks and burnt orange. The most beautiful. "Seated Woman" (c. 1940) from the Philadelphia Museum o Art, shows its model on a chair by a window, imagined over and over again by the artist through a long series of sittings. From the beginning, de Kooning worked and reworked his canvases endlessly, satisfied only when accident brought him a temporarily satisfactory result. Here the various arrangements of the woman's arms and legs and torso combine into one dynamic image whose face with its shadowed green eyes looks into the distance beyond artist and viewer to ask not only "Who am I?" but also "What shall I say?" It is startling to move to the next gallery of the exhibition, in which the palette is almost exclusively black and white. The human form, when suggested, is disassembled and rendered as generalized, biomorphic shapes that pitch unpredictably in

frame where something could be possible, where an artist could practice his intuition " Several large female figures from these years suggest the paintings for which de Kooning later became most famous. Each has a similar format: a woman with her head turned up, away from the viewer, with gaping eyes and teeth, a feral nose, pronounced breasts and coarse references to her female organs. Luscious coloringgold and violet, orange and yellowheightens the manic mood and the plea for meaning. "Woman I" from the Museum of Modem Art in New York, on which de Kooning worked from 1950 to 1952. is recognized as the breakthrough in the new .series. He went on to press his insights and present the female figure "as a landscape" (in 195455) or as what?an explosion, perhaps, in "Woman Vl" (1953). These figures at once ferocious and erotic, lavishly hucd. are as seductive as they ai-e forbidding.

Excavation, 1950
and dramatic touches of carmine red and pale green. And "'Painting" (1948), entirely in black and white, with the painter's own profile seemingly suggested and a fedora hat included perhaps as a tribute to his friendship with Stuart Davis, has all the jauntiness of an evening's bonhomie among male friends. (1948 was the year of de Kooning's first solo exhibition in New York, in which he showed mostly black and white works.) But in Ihe late 194O's de Kooning also used brilliant color, with a red ground conveying the high life of the various forms dancing on it in "Gansevoort Street" (c. 1949). or pale yellows and oranges suggesting the exhilaralion of a day at sea. highlighted by a Hoffmanesquc rectangle of indigo blue, in "Sail Cloth" (c. 1949). More mysterious, but as enchanting as a spring lyric, is the Phillips Collection's "Asheville" (1948). which draws one into and out from and around the canvas with its compact, swirling, brilliantly hued forms. Each of the paintings reveals how deeply indebted de Kooning was to cubism, with its fragmented forms reassembled in shallow space. "Of all movements," he said, "! like cubism most. It had that wonderful unsure atmosphere of reflection^a poetic X ICASSO had long since deconstructed the female face and figure. De Kooning reassembles the parts into a menacing, promising whole of confrontation, with each figure crowding the canvas and demanding our intimidated attention. From the beginning they were attacked for their supposed misogyny, as they surely will be now. ("That ferocious woman he painted didn't come from living with me." said his wife Elaine. "It began when he was three years old.") But there is humor and great ambiguity in the works as well. De Kooning cut mouths out of magazine advertisements and pasted them playfully onto his canvases. He confessed that in fact "many of my paintings of women have been self-port rails." Somehow the results continue to command, testifying to the female form and presence as the primal fact o de Kooning's life, the theme, along with landscape, worthiest of his creative energy. Other, brilliantly hued. almost entirely abstract compositions trom the niid-50's. such as "Composition," "Gotham News" or "Belize Gazette." seem almost a welcome relief when presented in the same gallery with de Kooning's women. With their broad, free brush strokes and great swaths of contrasting color, their remarkable energy and balance, these paintings in many

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AUGUST 27, 1994