The Brooklyn Rail

By installing non-chronologically this group of works by Willem de Kooning, dating from 1944 to 1986, the curator Cecilia Alemani has made clear the visual difference and repetition present in de Kooning’s painting, evidently at play over the artist’s entire career. Coming less than a year after Willem de Kooning e l’Italia at the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia, an extraordinary and revelatory exhibition, this is indeed a great twelve months for anyone interested in de Kooning’s process and evolution.

One sight line, looking from the first gallery the viewer enters, includes left to right the paintings Bill-Lee’s Delight (1946), Untitled X (1985), and Woman on a Sign II (1967), with Untitled X installed in the second gallery and visible through the open entrance to that space. A transition, horizontally, of similar shapes is seen in the 1946 and 1985 paintings, and these paintings both share the triangular incursions most prominently seen in the 1967 painting. Radical discontinuity, rift, caesura, and dissonant rhythm pervade all three compositions.

This constellation of paintings alone, and there are repeated examples here, bring the works’ historicity to the fore. In viewing and comparing such juxtapositions of de Kooning’s painting over the years, flashes of recognition occur: pictorial elements and techniques reappear frequently as a realization of the continuing presence of the past in a present oriented toward the future. Each individual image is now seen not as isolated from what has gone before, but in dialectical relation to it, and as potential for as-yet-unmade paintings. The paintings’ disjunctive, splintered flow circulates uncertainty rather than fixity, chance and randomness rather than permanence. It’s a quality of the sculptures, too, the human-sized Clamdigger (1972) a solid figure standing like a reflection in water held up as quivering substance. The monumental Standing Figure (1969–84) exists in several sizes; one is as small as a few inches and retains the direct haptic relation to de Kooning’s hands. The version here seems a misjudgment and destroys the scale of the paintings in their particular relation to the reach of a body. Perhaps it would be more suited to an outdoor placement.

The suffocating psychologism and subjectivist cliché that distorted the artist’s constant deferral of formal conclusiveness and refusal of direct meaning continued on to, and especially with, the late works. De Kooning’s approach was actually a desire for losing, or finding, himself in being—both pictorially as an artist in erasing figure/ground distinctions, and as a thinking entity in rejecting the subject/object distinction of the cogito. De Kooning used studio protocols to release himself from mastery and engage with the very ground of painting and being: whilst painting, he sometimes directed his gaze away from the canvas or drank heavily or used his non-dominant hand. Even printing off still-wet oil from one surface to another facilitated a blindness and release of control. The surface of a de Kooning is always present: worked, scraped, incised. Like a European painter always mindful of the material tableaux, de Kooning understood the support is not a mere convenience to be left behind and totally overpainted. An example where this is very visible appears here in Woman as Landscape (1954–55).

The fragmentary compositions seen across the years function allegorically and not as symbolic or definitive statements. Meaning is always deferred, taken up later, only to be deferred again. Contingency is constant. The paintings engage temporality and fragmentation, a manifestation of de Kooning’s experience of the modern world’s contingency—bereft of all but one certainty: human finitude.

All of which points to the mystery of the late-eighties works. There are six paintings here from the eighties, making up a quarter of the exhibition. Untitled V (1982) is the earliest one and represents something of a bridge from the paintings of the previous decade in that the emptying-out of polychrome form and increasingly expansive areas of white is only partially established. The paintings are marked by experience as trace, and history is present rather than further development and growth. The conventions previously established are now exposed and inscribed as colored line and near white shape: drawing as painting, from the consummate draftsman himself. There is nothing reduced as such, however. These works are simply condensed and lean. The late paintings are always contextualized with speculation about the artist’s life and cognitive and physical decline. But is this what the paintings are really expressing, encoding?

Comparing the late works of Ludwig van Beethoven to de Kooning’s late paintings is worthwhile: in both cases, the late works change qualitatively, becoming mysterious and remote. Both artists were extraordinary in creating new forms from disjunctive elements before their last works, and both examined human existence as seamlessly connected to nature. I’ll end with Theodor Adorno writing on Beethoven’s late works:

He no longer gathers up the landscape, so deserted and estranged, to form a picture; he bathes it in the light of fire ignited by subjectivity when, faithful to its dynamic idea, it strives to break out and crashes against the boundaries of the work. Even the late works remain processes; not in the sense of development, however, but as an ignition between extremes that will no longer tolerate any secure centre or harmony for the sake of spontaneity.