ART REVIEWS : ‘Woman’--Good as Modern Painting Gets

The survey exhibition of some 40 paintings and works on paper by Willem de Kooning at Salander-O’Reilly Gallery is generally impressive, but it also features what may be the single finest painting this critic has seen in more than a decade of local gallery-going. On loan from the Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina for this benefit show, which is assisting the Pediatric AIDS Foundation, the 86-year old artist’s “Woman” (1949-50) is about as good as modern painting gets.

Received wisdom has it that an assured muscularity of line is central to the achievement of De Kooning’s art, and this survey means to chart the evolution of that line through nearly five decades. It begins with the early male figure “Glazier” (1940), and continues through the recent, swooping, light-filled abstractions of the 1980s (“Untitled I,” 1984, is a glowing example). Drawing increasingly became the ruling motif for painting, the story goes, as De Kooning progressively exploded Cubist syntax into a fluid, all-over space.

The pivotal moment in this development is usually identified as having come in the exquisite black paintings of the late 1940s--a moment, alas, unrepresented in the show--where toothy shards of light alternately dissolve the darkness and crystallize within it. The black pictures, which just precede the mature series of “Woman” paintings that rank among the great works of the postwar era, are often cited as evidence that line wins out over any other factor in De Kooning’s painting. However, one look at the Weatherspoon “Woman” shows how foolish such dismantling of intrinsic elements can be.

While there can’t be any doubt that De Kooning’s celebrated virtuosity of draftsmanship--everywhere in glorious evidence at Salander-O’Reilly--was the linchpin for his brand of Expressionism, neither can there be any question that daring color is indispensable to the power of his painting. The color in “Woman” is shocking. De Kooning’s line seems miraculously to inflate into big, porous forms, where lurid purple clouds create a ghastly optical cast for the sensuous, fleshy tones of the figure. Alternately lusty and repulsive, the ripe and undulating figure is crowned by short, flickering strokes of crimson and gold (hair?), igniting a halo of sparks around the wide-but-melting eyes of the madonna/whore. Throughout, a sense of vulgar abandon is matched by an astonishing poise.

The exhibition is accompanied by a handsome catalogue with useful essays by Klaus Kertess and Robert Rosenblum. Unfortunately, it was produced for an earlier incarnation of the show, mounted at the gallery’s New York space last fall; the majority of the paintings here are different. But with important examples from many phases of this protean artist’s career, this is a lush and challenging exhibition not to be missed.

Salander-O’Reilly Gallery: 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (213) 879-6606, to Feb. 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Spanish Colonial With a Twist: What’s surprising about Manuel Ocampo’s 14 new paintings at Fred Hoffman Gallery is the way in which the best of them build on a genre both immense in numbers and commonly disdained (when it’s not simply being ignored). Spanish Colonial painting, with its often operatic displays of religious mysticism and its public role as politically manipulative propaganda, is here the foundation for an art with rather different aims.

In the rudely framed “Elegia,” a figure with an Asian torso, a world globe (turned to the Philippine Islands) for a head and a handlebar mustache reminiscent of the fat-cat character from the Monopoly game clutches a crucifix as his scepter. His other hand is severed. A skull of mortality lies at his feet, a halo of variously styled crosses circles his head. And tucked into this retablo ‘s frame is a book-plate engraving of an ideal Greek sculpture in the manner of Praxiteles and Phidius--an exalted cultural model to which the proud, damaged, Frankensteinian figure hardly conforms at all.

Taking an approach for which I know of no successful precedent, Ocampo has tapped a rich vein. Born and raised in the Philippines--a Spanish colony for more than 300 years, and an American one for 50--but now resident in Los Angeles, the 25-year-old artist clearly claims an intimate knowledge of the Colonial genre. He also claims considerable trompe l’oeil skill in reproducing, with oil or acrylic on canvas or wood, the weathered effects of battered, stained and abraded pictures of suffering saints, deities and sinners, so familiar to viewers of Colonial painting. Ocampo layers dense and conflicting images, ranging from the Crucifixion to hooded Klansmen toting swastikas, one atop another in a strategy familiar from Neo-Expressionism (an interest in Julian Schnabel’s art is clearly in evidence, occasionally too emphatically). Non-linear narratives partake of a decidedly Surrealist edge.

On one hand Ocampo’s roughed-up paintings imitate the look of their historic ancestors; on another, more resonant level, the beautifully manufactured blemishes champion the impurity of all cultural production. In this dense and divergent context, the recurrent presence of hooded Klansmen and dripping swastikas bears stark witness to the falseness of claims for cultural purity.

Fred Hoffman Gallery, 912 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (213) 394-4199, to Feb. 9. Closed Sun. and Mon.