Paintings From the Edge

Too bad Willem de Kooning is pegged as an Abstract Expressionist, for the painter--who died Wednesday at 92 in his glass-walled studio on Long Island--was a far more accessible artist than those in that group with intellectual pretensions.

A Dutchman, he became what Times art critic Christopher Knight called “distinctly American.” Stowing away on a ship in his native country, De Kooning arrived in New York in 1926 and was dazzled, he said, by the “fantastic girls . . . jazz, and Louis Armstrong.” He began painting houses in Hoboken, N.J., but by the late 1940s was producing highly influential paintings that while brilliantly abstract were never so out of touch with the observed world of figures and landscapes as to be inscrutable.

Most significantly, De Kooning was able to explore weighty themes without using the symbolic sledgehammers common in the “shock art” that has created so much political controversy in recent years. For instance, while the black-and-white anatomical segments in “Excavation” (1950) hint at the Holocaust, they also explore more timeless themes like alienation.

For Jackson Pollock, one of the few post-World War II artists of De Kooning’s stature, art came from entering a mystical, subconscious state of “pure harmony,” wherein paint dripped “automatically” onto the canvas. De Kooning’s art, by contrast, came from nervous self-conflict.

He was disappointed, he said, that often when he set out to capture the beauty of women he ended up painting garish, high-heeled figures with puckered lips. But De Kooning was brilliant at depicting the truth of his own conflicted feelings about the opposite sex.

As he once put it, recognizing something more self-satisfied artists do not, “You have to keep on the very edge of something, all the time, or the picture dies.”