De Kooning and Jackson Pollock are the most important of the abstract expressionists who put American art on the international map after World War II. Pollock was a reckless radical who took ““action painting’’ all the way to dripping dances with canvases on the floor. For all their sweat, those paintings seem a little icy nowadays, more to be admired for their daring than loved for their looks. De Kooning (who was much more erudite than he appeared in his paint-splattered work shirt) thrashed together European cubism, surrealism and expressionism into big, muscular odes to the very act of painting. His pictures astounded an art world whose idea of radical art was melting watches. Even at their most ferocious, the paintings manage to be delicate and beautiful.
De Kooning was born in Rotterdam in 1904. His mother, a robust barmaid, divorced his father when Willem was only 5. His formidable mom had to fight for custody, a fact often cited in parlor-psychology explanations of de Kooning’s famously libidinous ““Woman’’ paintings of the early 1950s. After studying art in Rotterdam, de Kooning sailed for America as a stowaway in 1926. In New York, according to legend, he nearly starved when he turned down window-decorator jobs because they would compromise his artistic integrity. Poverty sharpened his eye. Poet Edwin Denby said that de Kooning liked to meander through the city, noticing peculiar cracks in the pavement, odd bits of litter and neon reflections on wet streets. Two years after his first solo gallery show, at 44, de Kooning landed a year’s teaching job at Yale. But he found teaching so exhausting he never did it again. He spent his free time hanging out with other abstract expressionists and the critics who befriended them–smoking, drinking, arguing and sometimes brawling in a Greenwich Village dive called the Cedar Tavern. They also chased women. De Kooning, a diminutive hunk with a leading man’s face, was notoriously good at that, too.
He married a young painter, Elaine Fried, in 1943. She went on to her own considerable career as Elaine de Kooning. Life with the heavy-drinking de Kooning was difficult, and they separated in the 1950s. De Kooning’s only child–a daughter, Lisa–was born to a girlfriend, Joan Ward, when he was 52. But he and Elaine never divorced, and in 1978 she returned to him, at the never-finished house he started building in East Hampton, on New York’s Long Island, in the late 1960s, to pull him back from the alcoholic brink.
To de Kooning in the 1930s, Picasso was the man to beat. De Kooning was blown away by MoMA’s big 1939-40 Picasso show and labored under the influence of ““Guernica’’ for years, unable to shake cubism until he went abstract. The black-and-off-white ““Excavation’’ (1948) was his breakthrough. Shown in the 1950 Venice Biennale, it won first prize at the Chicago Art Institute’s annual exhibition the following year. When the abstractions started to sell, de Kooning was already into his ““Woman’’ series. His dealer requested more paintings like ““Excavation.’’ De Kooning protested ironically, ““I have no integrity! So I keep painting the Women.’’ Critic Mark Stevens, coauthor with Annalyn Swan of a massive de Kooning biography due out next year, says, ““His throwing away the black-and-white style in order to go on to something completely new is one of the great gestures in American art.''
He worked on ““Woman I’’ (1950-52) daily for three years, scraping it down and beginning again a hundred times. Its bulging eyes, huge breasts, garishly lipsticked mouth and details like the ankle strap on a shoe have made it a Rorschach test about such ’50s clichEs as ““momism’’ and the ““bitch goddess.’’ ““It’s not finished, but it’s a very good painting,’’ he once said, a remark that could be made about almost all his paintings. MoMA bought ““Woman I,’’ and it became perhaps the most reproduced modern painting in the world in the 1950s.
Purist critic Clement Greenberg, his early champion, declared that de Kooning had declined–a victim of ““homeless representation.’’ Other critics strongly disagreed. Over the next few decades the painter pursued a succession of styles, some superb, some not. The wham-bam, big-brush Long Island ““landscapes’’ of the late ’50s are wonderful, but the bubbly girls of the 1960s aren’t. The meaty landscapes of the mid-1970s are great again. Since the late paintings were completed with an unknown degree of help from studio assistants, they continue to provoke controversy. Could an artist increasingly unaware of his surroundings create good, let alone great, art? Was there enough of de Kooning’s hand in the very last ones to call them his? Nobody complains that Mark Rothko’s depression ruined his last paintings, or that Pollock’s notorious alcoholism taints what he painted just before the fatal car crash. True, the 1986-87 de Koonings look weary and thin. But many deft, gorgeous paintings sparkle in the current MoMA show. For most artists they’d be a career by themselves.
Once asked whether he was influenced by the old masters, de Kooning answered, ““I influence them, with my eyes.’’ Meaning that we see the past through the lens of the present. Since the present is moving, changing, art is always in magnificent flux–de Kooning’s painterly point precisely. While painting ““Woman I,’’ he wrote, ““As soon as [the abstract] comes into painting . . . it changes into a feeling which could be explained by some other words, probably.’’ That sounds a little like love. Stevens says that de Kooning ““loved to be in love, and he loved to paint.’’ Standing before a perpetually unfinished canvas in the spacious studio he built for himself in the Netherlandish landscape of the Hamptons, he at least found peace in one of his passions.
