Painting a portrait darkly

In the life and work of the Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning (1904-97), the good news comes early in this massive biography by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan. From the outset, this handsome, abundantly talented Dutch immigrant was the golden boy of New York’s avant-garde art scene, a painter from whom everything was expected and to whom nothing would be denied. Prestigious critics lavished his work with praise; important dealers vied to mount his exhibitions; younger painters saw him as a hero and role model; and the succession of desirable women eager to minister to his voracious sexual appetite seemed all but endless.

Yet bad news relentlessly dominates the closing chapters of “De Kooning: An American Master.” De Kooning’s self-inflicted wreckage is so vast that it casts a retrospective gloom and at times even a feeling of disgust.

To be sure, we are used to seeing the lives of painters of the abstract expressionist generation end badly. Jackson Pollock, the first to achieve international acclaim, died at the height of his celebrity in a fiery car crash caused by his drunkenness. David Smith, the greatest sculptor of that generation, destroyed himself at the wheel of his truck while speeding to a rendezvous with some Ivy League college girls half his age. Mark Rothko, who in some respects was the most thoughtful, if also the most despairing of the group, could not cope with the burden of his own success and committed suicide.

Yet, in many ways, the cruelest of the fates that befell these stars of the New York School was reserved for its most admired -- and in some circles, most beloved -- figure. Not only did De Kooning’s artistic gifts suffer an irreversible decline but the man himself disintegrated in a besotted haze of sexual excess, alcoholic blight and the mental eclipse of Alzheimer’s disease. To that scene of wreckage, squalor and despair add a grotesque epilogue in which the artist’s entourage of lawyers, accountants, caretakers, dealers, studio assistants, critics and family members worked overtime to keep up the fiction that De Kooning was still creating masterpieces even after he had lost his mental faculties. Stevens and Swan, both longtime arts writers, have traced the elaborate stratagems of his so-called late period:

“[D]e Kooning, who seemed only half alive when not working, began to shut down artistically....So a second campaign began to keep [him] working. He could still respond when a drawing was sketched onto a blank canvas for him. His assistants therefore selected drawings to project, and then drew them onto the canvas for him, in order to start him painting. Often, they would combine parts of different drawings to add variety.... Still, the projections obviously lacked the coherence and energy of de Kooning’s own mind and wrist.... An overwrought palette was also a problem.... Turquoises, roses, and purples appeared on late canvases.... [D]e Kooning repeated forms hypnotically.... He fixated upon whirling vortexes and arcs and circles. These closed circles were a testament to a mind locked into a continuous loop, repeating itself over and over.”

A strict secrecy was enforced, one that inevitably entailed a certain element of fraud. “The problem was not that such interventions took place,” write Stevens and Swan, “but that the paintings continued to be treated as if they were completely de Kooning’s.”

For many critics, De Kooning’s high point as a painter is to be found in the black-and-white abstracts of the late 1940s. These paintings catapulted him into the limelight with his first one-man show, in 1948. “In the winter and spring of 1948, De Kooning suddenly broke free in his own way, creating a succession of ‘black’ paintings that are among the most beautiful works of the 20th century,” the authors write of this crucial period. “Surrounded by the cans of cheap enamel, de Kooning, with the joy of a bum made rich, let go as never before, loading his brush and slathering on the paint and, as he put it, ‘going to town.’ ”

With a mode of abstraction in which calligraphic structures of black paint mingled with barely discernible traces of cubist grids and fragments of discarded figural motifs recalled from his high-energy drawings, De Kooning became an overnight star at age 44. One of the finest of these was called “Excavation (1950).” Many of them do have the look of an excavated lunar terrain.

About the “Women” paintings that shortly followed, critical opinion was -- and still is -- divided. These are so clearly governed by the artist’s unruly libido that at times they have the character of a public confession. “It almost forces the eye away, as one would turn away from another’s sudden and unexpected embarrassment,” the biographers write about the first of these paintings. “It seems visceral, frank, unabashed, humiliating.”

Beginning with “Woman 1 (1950-52),” with its threatening eyes and grotesque mouth, bulbous breasts and obscene squatting posture, De Kooning fiercely ridicules and distorts the female anatomy. In some subsequent paintings, a messy slash of pigment delineating an exposed vagina is painted with what critic James Fitzsimmons has described as “a fury of lust and hatred.”

Whether such painting was also an expression of “class anger,” as the authors claim, is more debatable, but they certainly are right in suggesting that with “Woman I,” De Kooning “emerged as master of a Rabelaisian strain of grotesquerie” that amounted to a “fierce assault on taste.” I have no quarrel, either, with their final summary: “De Kooning outlived himself. His final years, when he was hardly there, became a Balzacian story of money, melancholy, gossip and decline.” To tell that story on an appropriate scale, Stevens and Swan have given us a clear and candid biography that is itself Balzacian in scope. *