Ambiguity’s Art

If you take a sharpened pencil and draw a continuous line on a piece of paper, the line will steadily get fatter as the pencil point dulls. However, if you simultaneously roll the pencil with your fingers as you go, the line will maintain a more uniform thickness. The technique isn’t easy to master, but with some practice you can start to get the hang of it.

Now, multiply that difficulty by a factor of 10--or maybe 100--and you’ll have some idea of the jaw-dropping skill with which Willem de Kooning could link his hand to his eye and brain in order to draw. When the Dutch-born 20-year-old finished his training at Rotterdam’s art academy in 1924, he was well on his way to developing the precision and dexterity of a consummate draftsman. As he matured as an artist in the 1930s and 1940s, after immigrating to New York, he turned that proficiency toward abstraction.

A powerful, engrossing exhibition of 78 De Kooning drawings that opened Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art shows what he did with that legendary facility. “Willem de Kooning: Tracing the Figure” was organized by MOCA curators Paul Schimmel and Connie Butler. It focuses almost exclusively on a single subject from the academic repertoire--the female nude--while spanning the socially and artistically convulsive years 1938 to 1955.

Late in 1952, after two full years of labor, De Kooning had finished his momentous oil painting, “Woman I,” which is today an icon of postwar American art. (De Kooning died in 1997.) “Tracing the Figure,” bursting with the intense immediacy of artistic thought that only drawings can reveal, shows how he got there.

Its centerpiece is MOCA’s own “Two Women with Still Life,” which rightly occupies pride of place in the show. A bequest to the museum from the late Marcia Simon Weisman, it is the most complex and resolved drawing De Kooning made during the summer of 1952, just before he finished “Woman I.”

The large drawing (nearly 2 feet square) is executed in a rich variety of pastels. Its stormy all-over composition integrates two monumental figures, a seaside landscape and elements of still life into a scene at once voluptuous and brittle.

De Kooning took one part Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” mixed in a splash of Cezanne’s “Bathers,” added shards of Manet (“Olympia,” “Luncheon on the Grass”) and much more, then shook them all together. The hypnotic result is a ferocious refusal of orthodox American images of womanhood.

In the years after World War II, women experienced extraordinary social strains. Their critical participation in the war effort had radically altered their traditional role in American life. Having entered the labor force (including the armed services) in unprecedented numbers, women were then under pressure to return to hearth and home.

Led by American citizen-soldiers, the Allied victory in an international conflict of unprecedented brutality created deep, often unspoken urges for a restoration of normality. And what was normal before the war was becoming blandly idealized in the burgeoning imagery of mass culture, where Ozzie’s adventures with Harriet began to flicker across the nation’s new television screens at precisely the moment De Kooning was putting the finishing touches on his fierce and unruly “Woman I.”

De Kooning began his focus on woman-as-subject in 1938, shortly after he met painter and critic Elaine Fried, who would later become his wife. An early pencil drawing, circa 1940-41, shows her seated, returning in kind the intense stare De Kooning necessarily would have taken to the portrait process. Her head and hands are detailed and finely rendered, in the manner of Ingres; her torso is just a soft crumple of atmospheric graphite. A depicted setting is virtually nonexistent; her venue is instead the abstract environment of art.

The first section of MOCA’s exhibition ends around 1945-46, and it chronicles De Kooning’s initial forays from realism into abstraction. Works such as “Fire Island,” “Still Life” and “Seated Woman” reveal the influence of such New York immigrant-peers as the Armenian Arshile Gorky, whose transparent color and mutilated organic forms quickly crept into De Kooning’s art, and the older, mystically inclined Russian, John Graham.

More important as a writer (and gadfly) than a painter, Graham had published a 1937 book, “System and Dialectics of Art,” which was widely read in local art circles. Its mythic principles of synthesis and metamorphosis generally characterize De Kooning’s work.

Drawing was integral to his painting. He was famous for layering drawings on top of a painting in progress to chart the ever-evolving picture. Often he would use tracing paper, copy a section of the painting, then shift the layered drawing to reorient fragments of the image.

The fractured planes of Cubism, in which material objects and ethereal space interpenetrate one another, were always the formal armature on which De Kooning built his art. The layering technique heightened the visual appearance of Cubist splintering, which he wove together with organic brushwork or cobbled with bluntly drawn lines.

‘Pink Angels’ Launched a Period of Abstract Oils

Surrealism was another linchpin. Partly it was important for its organic vibrancy. A somewhat tame “Reclining Nude (Juliette Brauner)” (1938) is all soft and billowy long curves, like an odalisque by Jean Arp. Other pencil drawings attenuate the forms for expressionist effect. One of the most beautiful is “Study for ‘Pink Angels’” (1945), where twisting, limb-like forms melt within transparent layers of warm, buttery pastel color.

The first phase of De Kooning’s series of women concluded with the great oil painting “Pink Angels” (circa 1945), and it launched him into a five-year period of abstract oils characterized by a reduced palette and shallow, fragmented space.

Helpfully installed in a gallery adjacent to the drawing show are “Pink Angels” and a black-and-white picture called “Dark Pond” (1946), whose classic whiplash brushwork suggests a midnight glimpse of lightning reflected on black water. Both exceptional paintings have been lent for the occasion by the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, and they should not be missed.

The formal inventiveness of Surrealism wasn’t all that attracted De Kooning. Mining the psychosexual power of the unconscious was at least as important. The dismembered organic shapes hung on an architectonic framework in the oil, enamel and charcoal drawing “Mailbox” (1948) reek of ambiguous sexual violence. It’s more explicit in an untitled charcoal and oil on paper from around 1947, in which a writhing, jagged, reclining figure on a vivid yellow floor recalls Giacometti’s notorious Surrealist bronze, “Woman With Her Throat Cut” (1932).

The second section of the show follows the run-up to De Kooning’s landmark exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery in March 1953, where “Woman I” and five other paintings of the subject were introduced by a room of 16 drawings (including the MOCA pastel). It reaches a crescendo in a gallery that features 11 works executed on Long Island during the summer of 1952, which set the stage for the completion of “Woman I.”

Pushing to the Limits of Figurative Abstraction

The final works demonstrate how, after the stir created by the Janis show, De Kooning’s focus soon shifted. Most of these push figurative abstraction to its limits--sometimes successfully, sometimes not. The last one, “Figure in Interior” (1955), barely contains a hint of human anatomy at all.

De Kooning’s images of women have always been controversial. At first some assailed them for abandoning pure abstraction. Often they’ve been read as psychobiography, like Picasso’s paintings of his wives and mistresses.

Sometimes, given their inescapable violence and caricatured sexuality, they’re derided as misogynist. And certainly the social repression that created a public vacuum in women’s own artistic representations of themselves established a lopsided context for De Kooning’s ferocious works.

But as these extraordinary drawings at MOCA eloquently attest, his ambitious art is characterized by nothing so much as hard-won ambiguity. In postwar mass culture, a woman’s image was trapped in a prison of banality, and nobody has ever accused De Kooning of that. He tore conventional notions limb from limb, even as he consolidated new ones in their wake. His “Women” are something peculiar to our age: iconoclastic icons, suitable for a world in dramatic flux.

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“Willem de Kooning: Tracing the Figure,” Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 626-6222, through April 28. Closed Mondays.