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.”
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