Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning: Flesh, Scraped and Repainted

For nearly two years, from 1950 to 1952, one canvas in a Manhattan studio was painted, scraped down to the weave and painted again. De Kooning made numerous preliminary studies, started over repeatedly, mixed paint in huge quantities, and kept revising the color and texture of entire sections. The result, *Woman I*, looks violently spontaneous and is nothing of the kind. When MoMA's committee acquired it in 1953 they found it "quite frightening," and bought it anyway for its "intense vitality."

Rotterdam to a Stowaway's Berth

Willem de Kooning was born on April 24, 1904, in Rotterdam. He left grammar school at twelve to apprentice at Gidding & Zonen, a firm of decorators, and took night classes at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques from 1917 to 1921 — a trade education, not an artistic one, and the source of a craftsman's fluency he never lost. On July 30, 1926, he entered the United States illegally, having sailed as a stowaway and disembarked at Newport News, Virginia. He painted houses in New Jersey, moved to New York in 1927, and did not become an American citizen until 1962, by which point he was among the most famous painters in the country.

Between 1929 and 1931 he met Arshile Gorky, who became one of his closest friends and the decisive influence of his early maturity. He joined the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project in 1935 and from 1937 painted full time. Through the 1930s and 1940s, as Britannica notes, he worked in figurative and abstract modes at once, only synthesizing them around 1945 — the habit of refusing to choose that would define him. In 1943 he married the painter Elaine Fried, herself a formidable artist and critic.

Black and White, Then Excavation

The black-and-white enamel paintings of 1946 to 1949 were his breakthrough: cheap household enamel, no color to hide behind, forms that read simultaneously as anatomy and as pure shape. They carried his first solo exhibition, at the Charles Egan Gallery in 1948, when he was forty-four — it drew his first New York press notice, including a favourable review from Clement Greenberg. *Excavation* consolidated the mature abstract manner. By the start of the 1950s he stood with Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline at the centre of the New York School, and specifically of what came to be called action painting — the idea that the picture is the residue of a physical event rather than a plan carried out.

Then he did the one thing the movement's ideology forbade. He painted a woman.

The Woman Series

Beginning in 1950 the Woman paintings dominated his practice: six canvases in the first sequence, aggressive and fragmented, the figure assembled from broad shoulders, eyes taking up a third of the face, a virtually lipless mouth full of long teeth. *Woman I* is six feet three inches of oil and metallic paint, which MoMA describes as "an almost encyclopedic display of the physical possibilities of paint, ranging from thick to thin, rough to smooth, and opaque to translucent." *Woman and Bicycle* (1952–53) followed with the same raw, jagged brushwork and clashing color.

The reaction was severe on two fronts. Contemporaries in the abstract camp read the return to the figure as a betrayal of modernist principle. Others called the pictures misogynist — menacing, objectifying, violent. De Kooning's own line offers no comfort to either: "Beauty becomes petulant to me. I like the grotesque. It's more joyous." And, more famously: "Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented."

Erasure, Whisky, Springs

In 1953 a young Robert Rauschenberg asked him for a drawing to rub out. De Kooning, reluctant, consented — then was angry when the erased sheet was exhibited, feeling that "the murder should have remained private, a personal affair between artists," and dismissed the idea as "sort of a corny idea." That he agreed at all says something about his standing; that he resented the exhibition says something about what it cost.

The marriage strained badly under his drinking. He and Elaine separated in 1957; in 1956 his daughter Lisa was born to Joan Ward. He and Elaine reunited in 1976 and never divorced. In 1963 he left Manhattan for Springs, on eastern Long Island, and the work opened out into abstracted landscapes — *Door to the River* (1960) had already announced the change, made, as the Whitney describes it, with a full arm sweep and liquid paint applied at speed and force.

The Late Work and Its Argument

In the 1980s the paintings changed again: thinned, ribboned, luminous, stripped of the earlier density. De Kooning produced more than three hundred of them in that decade, roughly one a week — an extraordinary rate for a man in his eighties who was showing symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, formally diagnosed in 1989.

The dispute over these canvases has never been settled. Rumors circulated that studio assistants and family shaped the work; the curator Robert Storr documented that Elaine had "suggested to the assistants that they expand de Kooning's choice of colors," while the assistants firmly denied doing any painting themselves. SFMOMA's chief curator Gary Garrels has argued that "the 1980s will turn out to be one of the great periods," comparing their fluidity and openness to late Matisse and Monet. Against that, the critic David Bourdon called the work "thin and watered down," "a played-out mine," and the art historian Karen Wilkin found "a lessening of intensity," calling the pictures "ghosts of what he was capable of."

Why Willem Is Called a Genius

The specific gift was tactile intelligence — an ability to think through paint itself, its viscosity and drag and translucency, at a level almost no one has matched. The Whitney says he "expanded the language of painting with a mastery that had few equals in the twentieth century." What makes him more than a virtuoso is that he refused the era's central either/or. Every other major figure of the New York School chose abstraction or figuration; de Kooning held both in one canvas for fifty years, and the tension is what generates the electricity in *Woman I*. He was decorated accordingly: the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, Japan's Praemium Imperiale in 1989.

The counter-case is unusually concrete. The late work poses a genuine question about authorship — not fraud, but the murkier problem of how much of a painting made by a man with advancing dementia, surrounded by assistants who mixed his colors, is his. Serious critics such as Wilkin and Bourdon consider the eighties output a decline dressed up as a final flowering, and the market's enthusiasm for it does nothing to settle the argument. There is also the charge that dogged him from 1953 onward: that the Woman paintings brutalize their subject, and that decades of critical ingenuity spent explaining this away is itself a kind of evasion. Both objections are live. Neither dissolves the paint handling.

Legacy

De Kooning died on March 19, 1997, in East Hampton, at ninety-two, leaving roughly $7 million in liquid assets and an art collection valued between $50 and $150 million. His market has since become surreal: *Interchange* changed hands for around $300 million in 2015. MoMA's 2011–12 retrospective confirmed him, in the Whitney's phrase, as one of the best-known artists of the twentieth century — and, more to the point, as the painter who proved that a picture could keep arguing with itself and still hold together.

Achievements

• National Medal of Arts — 1986
• Logan Medal of the Arts — 1951
• Max Beckmann prize — 1984
• Praemium Imperiale — 1989
• Presidential Medal of Freedom — 1964
• Notable work: Woman III
• Notable work: Woman I
• Notable work: Seated Woman on a Bench
• Movement: abstract expressionism and action painting