The Idea of Painting-as-Adventure

Willem de Kooning started art school when he was 12. He stopped painting at 86. During the 74 years in between, he made some of the most flat-out remarkable paintings I have ever seen.

The Dutch emigre to the United States, who died of natural causes Wednesday on Long Island at the age of 92, transformed Parisian Cubism and European Expressionism into a whole new idiom. How he infused them with a scale and a temperament distinctly American and particular to New York has had an impact that is still being felt today.

Simply put, De Kooning made viewers relate to paintings in a whole new way. His famous and ferocious 1950s images of women are often talked about in psychological and autobiographical terms, as shocking modern icons of the subconscious writ large; yet, the intensely physical qualities of these riveting pictures were equally radical.

After all, a painting is a pretty odd thing. Think about it: A piece of cloth stretched tight over strips of wood that have been made into a rectangular shape is covered with goopy pigments mixed in oil.

If this were a common thing for human beings to make, artists everywhere would have always done it. But it isn’t and they haven’t.

Instead, this particular way of making paintings is peculiar to European culture of the last 500 years or so. When De Kooning painted his totemic “Woman I” (1950-1952), a painting whose lengthy creation was documented in a celebrated series of photographs by Rudolph Burckhardt, he began to use the sensual articulation of painting’s surface as a metaphor for the human body.

In the search to find a truly unencumbered image from his subconscious, he painted, repainted, scraped and repainted his canvas over and over again. It became the modus operandi of his work for the rest of his life.

In “Woman I” the result is an image whose very surface feels worn, battered, lived in. The ferociously grinning face with its enormous, staring eyes seems to top a body that has been brutally flayed on the surface of the canvas.

De Kooning had developed this lengthy and complicated procedure in a 1950 mural-like abstraction he aptly named “Excavation.” The decisive turning point, however, had come about a year before. “Pink Angels,” a smallish painting (now owned by L.A.’s Frederick Weisman Foundation) inspired by Picasso but marked by a voluptuous, transparent linearity wholly De Kooning’s own, starts to achieve a magical interpenetration of crystalline and biomorphic shapes. The painter was on his way.

In the 1950s pictures of women, though, something startling occurred: The depicted skin of the figure began to merge with the heavily worked surface “skin” of the painting. Lived experience was not just shown in his choice of human subject matter; it was also embedded in De Kooning’s paint.

Squared off, flattened out, interlocked with the surrounding environment, his women don’t imitate figures in three dimensions. Instead, they are in keeping with the two-dimensional space of painting. They breathe with the raucous fierceness of flesh and blood.

A similar quality is seen in his masterful drawings, such as “Two Women With Still Life,” 1952, given to L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art last year by the Marcia Weisman Foundation.

One reason De Kooning’s paintings can be so exciting to look at is that they speak of a boisterous new idea of painting-as-adventure. Indeed, Abstract Expressionist art had a kind of missionary aura in the 1940s and 1950s, as the United States emerged from World War II as an international power with an otherwise provincial art life.

De Kooning, a European expatriate, was in part a bridge between the Old World and the New. His work seemed to embody the span.

Remember, though, that it remained at the center of artistic events for only slightly more than a decade, before the big artistic watershed of the early 1960s came to pass. By 1964 the explosive arrival of Pop, Minimal and Conceptual art had changed just about everything. And by then De Kooning had gotten lost in a haze of often violent alcoholism; for some time after he was only intermittently able to paint.

The other inspiration provided by De Kooning’s illustrious career, however, was the way he eventually came back, mustering a magnificent body of late work in the 1980s. An exhibition of those paintings was seen at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1995 and is now, ironically, enjoying the final days of its international tour at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. For this most New York of New York School painters, it stands as a bittersweet testimonial to a career that in many ways made our present cultural life possible.