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Artist or Maker: Willem de Kooning (1904-1997)

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Exhibited: New York, Xavier Fourcade, Inc.,
Willem de Kooning: New Paintings, 1981-1982
, March-May 1982.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Minneapolis, Walker Art Center and New York, Museum of Modern Art,
Willem de Kooning: The Late Paintings, The 1980s
, October 1995-April 1997, pp. 81 and 117, no. 1 (illustrated in color).

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Notes: PROPERTY FROM AN EAST COAST COLLECTION


The facts of Willem de Kooning's biography are propitious for 1981-- a year of stability by comparison with the decade that preceded. During the 1970s, the artist suffered bouts of severe alcoholism. He struggled especially in 1978, in the wake of the sudden deaths of two dear friends and critical supporters, Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess. At 74 years of age, he may have felt that the world he knew was ending. It might have, had he not been rescued from his extremes of anxiety and the drinking that accompanied them by the intervention of Elaine de Kooning and other family and friends. De Kooning's production indicates that the cure was neither easy nor immediate: in 1979, he completed no more than a dozen paintings to his satisfaction, far fewer than was customary; and in 1980, the number was down to six. He may even have ceased working entirely during a part of that difficult year, a sign that he knew he was undergoing a profound transition. To someone who is in pain, physical and emotional well being returns as a shock as much as a joy. De Kooning stopped painting, and then he started again. Rather suddenly, sometime early in 1981, he resumed a steady pattern of production that would last through most of the decade. He was the same creative wonder but much healthier.

While maintaining a core of old habits-- proven ones, good ones-- de Kooning around 1981 made a series of practical adjustments. These led to substantial changes in the appearance of his work: not necessarily in his "style," but in the appearance. To say that de Kooning changed his "style" would put the matter too strongly, because, for an artist of his resolve, style runs extraordinarily deep. It encompasses the patterns, marks, gestures, rhythms, harmonies, and dissonances that are the soul of the painter's technique-hard wired, as it were, into both mind and body. De Kooning's painting is always "de Kooning" before becoming anything else. We understand it best in terms of the artist's process of making it, as opposed to what we might observe as the completed project removed from its maker, whether an abstract composition or the representation of a theme. For de Kooning, the emotional value of a work was built into the evolving experience of its production. He was accordingly often reluctant to let works leave his hands. To finish was to terminate his experience of all that he was feeling as the work acquired its character, always a bit of his own.

During the 1980s, de Kooning created several distinctive variations on his style, just as he had done during the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. His career can be conceived as one long set of variations of a single image that could assume any number of related forms. With all his restlessness, he maintained a connection to the entirety of his aesthetic past. His work is especially resonate emotionally because we sense that at every stage of his career, his imagery, whether abstract or representational in appearance, carries with it the accumulated experience of an integrated life. A work of the 1980s is different in appearance from one of the 1950s but true to all that preceded. "You have to change to stay the same," de Kooning liked to say, repeating the phrase to an interviewer in April 1981, just about the time he painted Untitled I. "Artists themselves have no past," he also remarked; "They just get older."

Paintings of the 1980s, nominally abstract, contain memories of de Kooning's figural compositions that first appeared decades previously, as early as the 1940s-- images of a single woman (occasionally a man) or of two women. In Untitled I, as "abstract" as it may be, we sense the figure in the organic snap of the linear edges, which curve like the convexities of flesh yet also angle like the moving joints of an arm or a leg. Most often, when de Kooning did overtly representational work, a single figure would occupy a vertical format, and a double figure would appear in a horizontal format. During all periods of his career, he liked to rotate his canvases, frequently switching from vertical to horizontal and back again as he developed a composition. This meant that he could conceive of an "abstraction" as a single figure at one moment and two figures at the next. Rotate Untitled I ninety degrees in either direction, and it is easy enough to imagine the presence of two personages, despite the broad swath of yellow that links one side of the canvas to the other. The area of yellow is itself contradictory in a fashion that held great interest for de Kooning, for he brushed it and scraped it both vertically and horizontally; its color implies that it is one, but its structure implies that it is two. In its entirety, Untitled I becomes a study in this kind of tension, with the very unsettling result that the painting never reaches a conventional stability. If it had, de Kooning would never have signed it and allowed it to leave the studio. Untitled I remains alive with its creator's emotional tension, as he intended it. "[It's] when I'm slipping, I say, hey, this is very interesting! It's when I'm standing upright that bothers me." He made this statement around 1960; but with respect to this point of instability, he never changed.

De Kooning's sense of figuration-the compositional tensions and contradictions he liked to develop-existed not only as forms within his store of visual memory, but also, and perhaps more importantly, as a kind of physical imprint to be released from his painter's materials by the practiced gestures of his hand, arm, and body. To this end, he would transfer imagery from both older work and newer work, using sheets of newsprint to make a kind of monotype or using transparent vellum to make a tracing. Most likely, some of the initial compositional elements of Untitled I were derived from the painter's store of traced drawings on vellum, seen strewn around the studio in photographs taken during the 1970s and '80s. He could develop and enhance a tension between horizontal and vertical forces by adding linear elements from these vellums, varying the orientation of each sheet or even each application of one and the same sheet.

Untitled I may be the first work that shows the full effects of the adjustments to de Kooning's studio technique introduced around 1981. Indeed, the time was propitious, in part because the artist benefited from the services of a new assistant Tom Ferrara, who arrived in 1979. Ferrara began to back de Kooning's canvases with foam core so that pressure could be applied to the surface without fear that the canvas would lose its tautness or rub against the stretcher bars. This allowed de Kooning to use metal scrapers vigorously with impunity, at times virtually digging into the canvas-- a technique that was familiar from past work but seems especially essential to the paintings of 1981. He would apply paint with a heavily loaded brush and then articulate the form by spreading the wet pigment with the scraper, often removing much of it in the process. The technique would continue: add, adjust, remove, add again, and so on, all the while rotating the canvas-complication upon complication. Many of the curious effects seen in Untitled I result from de Kooning's practiced use of the scraper to add nuance to the edge of a colored form as well as bring up from beneath the form the residue of other layers of paint. The result is a surprising mix, not only of colors, but also of opacity and transparency. By twisting the scraper as he dragged it, and by varying the pressure, de Kooning achieved a spatial ambiguity along edges that becomes a source of tension analogous to that between horizontal and vertical forces. Facing Untitled I, we cannot determine what moves toward us within the painting's field of action and what moves away from us. What we can know-not because there is a logic to it, but because we must sense it in our bodies-is that something is moving. The painting is as alive for us now as it was for de Kooning in 1981. He made certain to keep it that way-changing to stay the same.