Remembering a Lifetime of Work by Willem de Kooning

The MOMA Retrospective Wraps Up After Offering a “Cosmos Unto Itself”

NEW YORK—For ten more days, the art of Willem de Kooning will dominate the top floor of the Museum of Modern Art, telling the story of a New York artist in the city that made him famous. This retrospective, opened in September with nearly 200 works across de Kooning’s long career, shows him “as a whole and in depth.” It has been unlike any previous exhibition of the Dutch-American “abstract expressionist” painter.

            The exhibit also wants to reveal that de Kooning was more than simply a star “action painter” in 1950s Manhattan. His works spanned seven decades. However, to do justice to the “depth” of his career, you will have to read the definitive biography, De Kooning: An American Master (by Mark Stevens and Analyn Swan, 2004), as well. What the MOMA retrospective offers is a visual feast of de Kooning’s periods and themes. The visual effect is quite enough, and every viewer will find favorites. After looking, though, it will take some extra intellectual digging to understand how de Kooning’s work was also shaped by the ideological battles in the Manhattan art scene of his day.

            In this column’s opinion, de Kooning’s early mid-career work (1938-50) was his best. It was a time when he swung between, and mingled, abstraction and “figuration” (human figures). At the start, his images looked a lot like Arshile Gorky’s biomorphic portraits and fantasias, but de Kooning was authentically distinct, using a color scheme of green, pink, yellow, and orange. His drawing skills added to the gratifying sense of limbo he created between two realities (real and abstract).

            At the end of this early period, he veered toward pure abstraction in his truly unique black “landscapes,” and then the flip-side, his white landscape abstractions. Of these, his whitish Excavation (1950) was his largest canvas and most praised work. This period is full of visual effects that evoke mystery and contemplation.

            Then de Kooning started to do his “Women” series (1950-53). At this point, it seems that he was under pressure in New York to stand out. A handful of art critics were choosing ideological sides. Clement Greenberg made Jackson Pollock messianic, whereas Harold Rosenberg promoted action painters such as de Kooning. Greenberg said true painting was an abstract “object”; Rosenberg said it was an “event.” For this reason, Greenberg opposed de Kooning (who used some figures), while Rosenberg and Artnews cheered the Dutch-American painter for his eventful and emotive actions with paint and canvas.

            As a consequence, perhaps, de Kooning is best known for the raw-emotive Women series—and more for its raw emotion than its visual mastery. Inexplicably, the Women paintings each took a year or three to complete. They underwent revisions, falters, redoings, and abandonment before being declared “finished.” Often, according to photos of the process, the final work is not much different from the start. With the Women series, therefore, the emotional “process” is supposed to be the important element: it is de Kooning’s calendrical struggle charted in paint.

            The MOMA curators speak of the Women series (of six similar paintings) as de Kooning’s epitome of resolving “figure and field.” The curator has every right to say this, of course. Let it also be said, however, that even “expert” art judgment invariably leans subjective. Others might say that the figure and ground in Women is unexceptional.

            What is certain, of course, is that de Kooning’s Women series created controversy. It opened the way for a new period and, don’t forget, gallery sales. The next period was called his most successful, his “full arm sweep,” when he used giant house painting brushes to make brutal strokes of oddly clashing, or very muddy, colors on canvas. These bespeak the emotion that, according to favorable critics, made abstract expressionism the greatest art to ever appear in the Western tradition.

            This raises the question of emotion in art. In de Kooning’s very productive life, we are confronted with the role that intoxicants played in all this painterly emotion. Unfortunately, he and other painters, such as Mark Rothko, became alcoholics. A sober question always lingers: how much of their abstract painting was intoxicated. Over his later years (1960s-1980), de Kooning produced new and stunning “periods,” but they all show a deterioration of control. Sometimes the effect is beautiful. But more often one wonders why these murky, cavalier works are extolled so highly by art critics and sold for millions.

            Nonetheless, de Kooning’s life was a heroic artist’s life. He stuck with his trade through thick and thin, even unto the tragic onset of Alzheimer’s. His gift to the world is a productive life in art. There is virtually something for everyone to look for and enjoy. He learned traditional art as a youth, paid his dues painting 1930s murals, and then caught the great abstractionist freight train in Manhattan, producing as unique a lifetime of paintings as any artist we know.

            Remember, however, this is uptown New York. And in New York celebrating the “New York School” is part of cultural legend-making and provincial pride. We forget that in de Kooning’s day, the Manhattan art writers battled for supremacy, as did the gallery dealers. They were all myth makers. Often, the artists were merely the weapons the writers used to score points in their rival theories of "true" art. Offering a more level-headed approach today, New York magazine’s art critic Jerry Saltz gives us this nice summary of MOMA’s de Kooning retrospective: “A cosmos unto itself, visual wisdom for the ages.”

These Stained Glass Windows Offer a Detective Story

The Medieval Revolution in Gothic Art Reassessed at St-Denis Church

The monastery church, or even the towering cathedral, is not exactly a hot topic in today’s contemporary art. Around Christmas time, however, it’s harder to ignore the role that stained glass windows in medieval sanctuaries played in shaping the Western art tradition.

            How did Gothic art arise, and who was responsible? The detective work could begin in 12th century France, at the ancient church of St-Denis in north Paris, according to the current issue of The Art Bulletin, which offers a cover story on stained glass.
            At St-Denis, burial site of French kings, the monastery's abbot merged the art styles of his day, including stained glass, and this synthesis rapidly spread the Gothic look across all of Europe. “Nothing less than a new conception of the religious work of art was taking place at St-Denis,” art historian Conrad Rudolph writes in Art Bulletin.
            During the 1100s in Europe, the great monastery churches were embroiled in a certain amount of politics, and one of the most heated topics was the use of art in the vast monastery church network. Christians had always used art. Very simple and didactic stained glass, like murals, had been in use for 500 years already. The early Pope Gregory the Great gave the rationale: “Those who are illiterate may at least read by seeing on the walls what they cannot read in books.”
            Over time, churches also began to fill up with pictures of monsters, grotesques, weird plants and animals, and human contortions, all of this spreading on walls, drain spouts, columns, and seen even in stained glass. Such crazy resplendence did not last, however. By the 12th century, monastic reformers had been cutting back on such distractions, arguing, as did the influential Bernard of Clairvaux (in 1125), that art in principle was a lower material experience. Art was an obstacle for monks on their spiritual journey to higher contemplation and virtues.
            So along comes Abbot Suger, a young monk at St-Denis who became its abbot and, in 1135, began a great building program to expand the old Romanesque church (movig away from those Roman characteristics of heavy walls, towers, and pillars). As is well known, with his resources, Abbot Suger was able to bring together all the new architectural inventions of the era to create a more light-filled, vertical, and ornate kind of church—to be called Gothic, and to take Europe by storm.
            With new architecture, Suger could make the leaded glass windows much larger, and it was only natural to want to make them more elaborate, educational, and stunning. But he had a political problem: how to expand this art without upsetting Bernard, who set the tone in monastery politics? Suger found the solution, historian Rudolph tells us, by cleverly using theology to justify the expansion of art. In short, Suger said that an elaborate window could be like a book. When monks looked at this kind of window art, they were studying scriptures, theology, and the virtues (which Bernard endorsed heartily). The information in the stained glass was “accessible only to the literati,” Suger explained. It was higher learning, not artistic distraction.
            This was very much theological inside-baseball among the monks, as Rudolph shows, involving beliefs about the three (or four) stages of spiritual growth in a monk's life. For all we know, Abbot Suger simply liked stained glass, and by citing the theologian Hugh (another player), he began to suggest that even non-monks could spiritually benefit from the art.
            In time, Suger and Hugh’s implicit argument won the day: non-literati could also grow spiritually by looking at sophisticated stained glass windows. Ordinary people, too, had spiritual stages that art could stimulate. And so it was that Abbot Suger’s art program, carried out systematically at St-Denis, opened the way for truly Gothic stained glass to appear in other churches. Over at Chartres Cathedral, for example, a slightly less elite window was innovated, producing 184 portals as if giant Gothic kaleidoscopes.
            In his article, Rudolph takes us through a good deal of theological detective work. However, his broader conclusions about art history may be the most fascinating for today. Because Abbot Suger justified higher quality art as a service to both monks and the 12th century’s growing class of educated Europeans, he spurred a widespread revival of art. He renewed the populist vision of Gregory (over that of Bernard).
            Rudolph also shows that today’s heated debated on “originality” in art is not new. Back in Suger’s day there was always a young theologian or two who claimed a radical new “invention” in the face of orthodoxy. Suger had sidestepped such revolutionist rhetoric. “Suger did little more than propose the same justifications for religious art that had been offered since the beginnings of Christianity,” Rudolph says. Abbot Suger's innovation was to pull together “previously existing elements to address contemporary needs.”
            This was a quiet revolution in art. For ordinary people, the day soon came in most churches of Europe when their “field of vision was flooded with brilliant light, glowing color, obviously meaningful forms, bewildering detail, and unfathomable inscriptions.” They couldn’t necessarily read these theological books of stained glass—as it still goes today. But the art inspired. The rest is art history.

Humor Us: The Search for Truly Funny Art

A Serious Discussion of Art and Laughter Can Be Rare as a Good Joke

In 1967 the conceptual artist Bruce Nauman made a neon spiral in blue and pink that said, tongue in cheek, “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths.”

            That was funny, if you got the self-effacing irony.
            Then in 2008, another artist named Bert Rodriquez made a suspiciously similar spiral of neon in blues and pinks. It said, “The True Artist Makes Useless Shit for Rich People to Buy.” That was funny, too, especially if you knew that Nauman, by poking fun, had sold his neon works to rich people.
            For better or worse, the question of humor in art has tended to be like the proverbial tiger chasing its tail. One artist makes jokes on another artist—making jokes on other artists. Most art does not intend to be funny, and perhaps that’s way the wider topic is addressed only occasionally.
            This month, at least, the venerable Artnews devotes its year-end issue to “What’s So Funny,” and the Metropolitan Museum of Art is getting attention for its “Infinite Jest” exhibit of satirical prints across history. Everyone realizes that most humor is not strictly visual (in a fine art sense), and when it is, it’s usually in the form of comics or sit-com “sight gags” (something to see that evokes immediate laughter).
            As the “Infinite Jest” exhibit suggests, the best documented form of visual humor is the satirical drawing. Every day, newspaper cartoonists still do this, a tradition that goes back to such fine art greats as Leonardo da Vinci and Francisco Goya. Satire usually relies on caricature or exaggeration, or by turning people into animals or objects to make an editorial point. Doing this well can be a rare talent, says graphic artist Steven Heller in his book Design Humor, but it makes communication easier: “Humor lowers defenses, releases steam, and excites the mind.”
            Humorists from Mark Twain to Woody Allen have warned about dissecting humor, but it’s been done nevertheless. The still-dominant “incongruity” theory of humor was well put by the French essayist Pascal long ago: “Nothing produces laughter more than a disproportion between that which one expects, and that which one sees.” All rapid surprises are not pleasant, of course, but humor fills this benign role (with punch lines, timing, etc.) Two other theories are common, that humor offers “relief” (a Freudian anti-repression idea) and that it allows us to feel superior, since much humor is about laughing down at the absurdity and misfortune of others.
            Traditionally, art has generated amusement through straight-forward images that create surprising incongruity or exaggeration. The painter Red Grooms’s large 2003 canvas, “'Manet at the Met,” is funny for its ability to caricature every kind of city person who jams into big art museums. This is not laugh-out-loud humor. But the pleasure is augmented by Grooms’ painting and rendering skills.
            Today we have postmodern artistic humor, according to Sheri Klein in her book Art and Laugher. Since the 1980s, she says, art humor has increased by way of more literary forms, or use of events and technologies. “Postmodern artists my not produce any objects at all,” Klein says. Postmodern art humorists often look like entertainers, a long tradition in cabaret or theater. Meanwhile, if there are four uses of humor—group solidarity, reduction of malice, pleasure, and criticism of norms—the last two best characterize postmodern art, Klein suggests.
            Postmodern humor may be a revival of “blague,” a French term for a condescending prank. The revival may be a mystery. “Why has the past century in particular been rich in jokes, hoaxes, forged identities, subversive graffiti, and mass and solo performances with an aim to shock or annoy, as well as shenanigans that some would be loath to qualify as art?” art writer Ann Landi asks in Artnews. The instigators of pranks as a form of art claim that they provide helpful commentary on problems in society, and problems in the art world, at least by getting attention. One art theorist is advocating “prank theory” to explain these in and outs, if they need explaining.
            Landi cites art historian Simon Anderson’s assertion that humor is probably hidden across all of art history, even in its great works. We just don’t know the times, clues, and incongruities—indeed punch lines—that might have existed, say, in the Sistine Chapel in its day. “I think there are jokes going on throughout the history of painting,” Anderson said. Uncovering that context is a challenge, according to the “Infinite Jest” curators. They found “humorous” prints, but could not find an obvious punch line. “We have to dig through the historical record to reconstruct not only the event to which a print refers but also to figure out what people thought about it at the time,” said Nadine Orenstein, the Met’s curator of drawings and prints.
            Trying too hard to be funny can backfire. A good deal of contemporary joke-art is hard to “get,” seems forced, or is simply too bitter to be funny. Still, no medicine has a better vehicle than humor. As design guru Heller says, amid the constant parade of art and design books and annuals he sees, the “most memorable” pieces tend to provide humor and information all at once. And it's not easy to do.

How the Internet and the Masses Gave Us “Participatory” Design

A New Book Talks about Designing Art with User-Generated Content

For graphic designers, the times they are a changing
            That’s the message of a delightful new book, Participate: Designing with User-Generated Content. In a concise 160 pages (with lots of pictures), the paperback aims to help artists find handles on the nebulous Internet and software revolutions, which are rapidly changing art making.
            The first kind of handle is the term “participate.” The authors, Helen Armstrong and Zvezdana Stojmirovic (both college art instructors), define participation as different from the more traditional “collaboration” in art. In the fast-paced world of Internet relationships, collaboration by co-equal partners is being eclipsed by lots and lots of people joining in a particular art project.
            This is the brave new world of participation: Artists must now expect their audiences to want to add on to artworks, contribute to information flows, and even alter the images and advertisements of products and services they buy. During participation, in fact, there may not be a final product. Participation is about a process that may be unfinished. The payoff could be an artwork, or a cash benefit. It may also simply be social therapy—the satisfaction of joining in. As every politician now realizes, Internet participation creates the “base” and brings out the vote. The same is true in organizing art projects, apparently.
            This is changing the ground rules for graphic design, the authors say. “Graphic design is often about control—controlling what the audience sees, controlling the typography of a piece, controlling its concept.” In contrast, “Participatory design requires user content for completion. Rather than delivering clean, finished products to a passive audience, participatory designers are creating open-ended generative systems.”
            This may sound a bit nebulous (as is the Internet itself). But as the authors know well enough, big business and big media are taking this nebulosity quite seriously. Facebook and Goggle have become behemoth industries. Time, Inc. has just hired a digital advertising pro as its new head. The new editor of the New York Times says her goal is to make the grey old lady of newsprint “interactive” to consumer participation.
            The great shift is generational, of course. Older folks are accustomed to the old model of hard copy art and media, produced by individual writers or artists. This has grown too costly and no longer has cache. The younger generation through the thirties, even forties, is shifting its mindset entirely, we are told, toward Internet products, mobile devices, apps, Internet groups, and just about every new bell and whistle you can buy at an Apple Store (or purloin from the Internet).
            So what is the graphic designer to do? According to Armstrong and Stojmirovic, the designer should keep four themes in mind: Community, Modularity, Flexibility, and Technology. The book, published by Princeton Architectural Press (in New York) is nicely organized around these four topics. Each section has a critical essay, examples of participatory design, interviews with designers, and projects for students in the classroom.
            The authors start with Community. They make a fairly persuasive argument that the social Internet is based on the number of “conversations” you can get going. From these come “connections” and finally a semi-permanent community. That community can join projects, buy products, or simply produce fun and enjoyment. These communities are also “wrenching cultural production from the hands of mass media.” Thus, the tone of the new approach, while commercial, is also rather anti-establishment and anti-corporate. As one slogan goes: “Content is Not King—Contact Is.”
            These communities can create artwork on the Internet (or by meeting at real places) through the use of Modularity, or pre-designed small pieces (modules) that can be added on. Modules have limits. But the adding-up power is unlimited. So for example, in participatory art projects people fill in templates, or add new modules to a growing accumulation. This may not suit the aesthetic tastes of everybody. But as the book’s examples show, it is a growing phenomena in the art world. Today, you can punch out your own modular book or piece of clothing “on demand.” Another slogan fits here: “Mass customization.”
            What, then, is Flexibility? This is the fact that product logos and brand names can no longer be carved in stone. A company or organization must interact with its community and alter the brand image as the community likes. This moving “from corporate mark to flexible identity” is delicate. The company must retain its integrity while still responding to whims of the mob. Like it or not, this is being called for in the new Internet market, and designers must pay heed.
            The final concern is Technology. The authors give an overview of the high-tech revolution beyond just computers: It includes the “open source” software revolution begun with Lenix in 1983, followed by anti-copyright movements such as “copy left” and “creative commons.” Meanwhile, the key to technology is that computers create algorithms: set patterns that computer code experts make and put into action. For artists, these algorithms (or “parameters”) can be off-the-shelf tools to create designs quickly, cheaply, and with a degree of chance mixed in, hopefully to produce new creativity.
            The challenge for designers is to become comfortable with the brain-numbing fact of code, indeed, thousands of lines of it everywhere. When it comes to writing code, “Code easily intimidates.” The tyranny of code experts may now be upon us. Despite dreams of democracy, it is unimaginable that everybody will write code. Nonetheless, the authors say that the algorithm-based technology has for the first time opened the way for enthusiastic amateurs to invade the art and design field.
            This problem of who controls the code is one of many challenges the book states plainly enough. Another is the copyright conundrum: How to be law-abiding, yet make code and products free, and yet still allow designers and artists to earn money. On this battlefield “between corporate control and open source ideology,” the book does not presume to offer a solution. Its goal is to introduce projects and opportunities.
            If there’s a gap in this discussion—and it appears in most works about art and the Internet—it is the ethical side. Art usually avoids ethical questions anyway. It simply wants the largest playing field for creativity. Recall also that it was telephone line “hackers” who launched the computer-Internet revolution. Seen in this light, participation ideology may be the early glimmers of an “Occupy Wall Street” for art and design.

A Museum Focused on Clyfford Still Opens in Denver

The Late Abstract Expressionist Painter Wanted His Work all in One Place

There is Norman Rockwell’s museum in Stockbridge, Mass., Salvador Dalí’s in St. Petersburg, Fla., Marcel Duchamp’s in Philadelphia, Georgia O’Keefe’s in Santa Fe, and Andy Warhol’s in Pittsburgh—and now Clyfford Still has his own museum in Denver.

            Clyfford Still?
            In the 1940s and early 1950s, Still was in the pantheon of American Abstract Expressionist painters. But as an independent sort, he departed from the New York scene, and in 1961 moved to rural Maryland. When he died, virtually all of his lifetime work was stored in his barn. His will, executed through his wife, said that the art would never be sold separately or be shown with other artists.
            Virtually that entire body of work—825 canvases, 1,575 works on paper and 3 sculptures—has now been deposited in the new Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, which opened on November 18. The project has been seven years in the making.
            Like Rockwell, Dalí, Duchamp, O’Keefe, Warhol and a few others, Clyfford Still is among that elite group that has an American museum devoted to its work. After his early success, up to 1952, Still broke from the gallery system and stockpiled his art. After his death in 1980, his will required that his artworks stay together. A number of large museums appealed to his wife to donate the collection. But it was Denver’s mayor—and now governor—who persuaded her in 2004, a year before she died, that the western city was the place to entrust her husband’s legacy.
            Still was a son of the West. He was born in North Dakota of Canadian parents. He moved to Spokane, Wash., for most of his youth, lived on a large wheat farm, and began his painting career doing what looked like “regional” painting—images of workers, farmers, and rural landscapes. Suddenly, he turned to complete abstraction. He was among the earliest of the Abstract Expressionists (some say the first) to use extremely large canvases, a scale that he liked in old-masters mural paintings. However, his large work was very “minimal”: He could cover an entire 13-by-19 foot canvas with a single color, then apply just a few jabs of other colors at an edge or corner.
            Critics of his work say he fell into a stylistic predictability. Many of his paintings have a “lightening” motif, jagged thunder-bolt-like lines overlapping each other. Nonetheless, his kind of “Ab Ex” painting is apparently in high demand, if only because of the name and hard-to-get status. This explains what happened at a Sotheby’s auction in New York a few days before the Clyfford Still Museum opened.
            On the evening of November 9, four of Still’s paintings fetched a total of $114 million on the contemporary art auction block. “Up in the skybox [at Sotheby’s], the Denver officials were toasting themselves with champagne, or perhaps it was Coors,” said one report. The $39 million museum was paid for by private donors, so the sale was necessary to produce an endowment for the museum, its trustees have said. The idea of a museum selling its art for cash is frowned on in the profession (it is called deaccession). Even so, the surviving Still family did not object, and Denver needed a cash flow.
            The custom-made museum (with 28,500 square feet of space) has special features. Foremost, it will show only works by Still, according to the artist’s will. The museum is just a few blocks from the Denver Art Museum, so the reclusive painter nevertheless will be in a larger context of other artists.
            The top floor of the two-story museum has natural lighting. On the bottom floor, visitors can also see the glass-enclose storage area, where many of the non-exhibited paintings will be visible on racks. At its opening, the museum features an overview of Still’s styles and experiments, seen in 60 paintings, 45 works on paper, and 3 sculptures. These date from 1925 to the late 1970s. About 200 of his paintings are on the gigantic-sized canvases, so a few of these will dominate.
            Many artists try to control their work with the same alacrity as did Still. However, most of those artists go to the grave undiscovered. Other artists are the opposite of Still—they put their work up for exhibit and sale as soon as the paint is dry. Clyfford Still did offer exhibitions at a few major museums. But he played the game his own way. As rarely happens, his strict intentions continue to be fulfilled.
            A few of the museums devoted to a single artist open their doors to others. The Georgia O’Keefe Museum in Santa Fe is overwhelmingly a showcase of her work. Yet it also is dedicated to “O’Keeffe’s art shown with that of her contemporaries [and] works of living artists of distinction.” The Andy Warhol Museum is dominated by 8,000 of his own works, but regularly shows other artists as a main feature.
            We will watch and see what happens with the Clyfford Still Museum.
            In the meantime, all of his works are in one place, shown together, protected in perpetuity, and brooking no comparison with other artists. It’s about as honorary a monument as any bygone artist can ask for. If there is life after death for an artist, this must be its highest earthly form.