Willem De Kooning Was Influenced by Past Works of Art Like

In 1926, Willem de Kooning, a penniless, 22-year-onetime commercial creative person from the Netherlands, stowed away on a freighter bound for America. He had no papers and spoke no English. After his send docked in Newport News, Virginia, he made his mode north with some Dutch friends toward New York City. At beginning he found his new earth disappointing. "What I saw was a sort of Holland," he recalled in the 1960s. "Lowlands. What the hell did I want to go to America for?" A few days after, notwithstanding, equally de Kooning passed through a ferry and railroad train last in Hoboken, New Jersey, he noticed a human at a counter pouring coffee for commuters by sloshing information technology into a line of cups. "He just poured fast to fill it up, no matter what spilled out, and I said, 'Boy, that'southward America.'"

That was de Kooning, too. Of the painters who emerged in New York during the late 1940s and early '50s—Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, among them—de Kooning, who died in 1997, remains the nigh hard to capture: He is too vital, restless, jazzy, rude and unpredictable to fit into any one particular loving cup. He crossed many of fine art's boundaries, spilling between abstraction and figuration over a period of 50 years—expressing a broad diversity of moods—with no business organization for the conventions of either conservative or radical taste. According to Irving Sandler, an fine art historian who has chronicled the development of postwar American fine art, it was de Kooning who "was able to continue the grand tradition of Western painting and to deflect information technology in a new management, creating an advanced manner that spoke to our time."

The de Kooning retrospective that opened last calendar month at the Museum of Modern Fine art (MoMA)—the commencement devoted to the total scope of the artist's seven-decade career—presents a rich, nuanced view of a great American painter. For curator emeritus John Elderfield, who organized the show, the try was unusually personal: the allure of de Kooning's art helped lead the English-born Elderfield to settle in America. He argues that de Kooning is a painter of originality who invented a new kind of modern pictorial space, one of ambivalence. De Kooning sought to retain both the sculptural contours and "bulging, twisting" planes of traditional figure painting, Elderfield suggests, and the shallow picture plane of modernist art establish in the Cubist works of, for case, Picasso and Braque. De Kooning adult several different solutions to this visual event, condign an artist who never seemed to cease moving and exploring. He was, in his own enigmatic plow of phrase, a "slipping glimpser."

During the '50s de Kooning became the most influential painter of his twenty-four hours. "He was an artist's creative person," says Richard Koshalek, manager of the Smithsonian'south Hirshhorn Museum, which has 1 of the largest collections of de Kooning's work. "He had a peachy impact on a very wide range of artists." Brice Marden, a painter who was the subject of a 2006 MoMA retrospective, agrees: "You were brought up on de Kooning. He was the master. He was the teacher." To many he was also a romantic effigy with movie-star looks and an existential swagger, as he drank at the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village with Pollock and moved from love thing to love thing.

Despite his success, de Kooning eventually paid a cost for his unwillingness to follow the prevailing trends. His always-changing art—especially his raucous depiction of women—was increasingly slighted past critics and fine art historians during his lifetime. It did not, Elderfield suggests, "fit easily with those works idea to maintain the familiar modernist history of an increasingly refined abstraction." The curators at MoMA itself tended to regard de Kooning after 1950 as a painter in decline, as evidenced by the museum'south own drove, which is considerably stronger in Pollock, Rothko and Newman than in de Kooning.

The quarrel has ended: The current retrospective makes amends. De Kooning's range now looks like a forcefulness, and his seductive manner—"seductive" is the appropriate word, for his castor stroke is total of touch—offers a painterly delight rarely found in the art of our day.

De Kooning grew up near the harbor in tough, working-class Rotterdam. He seldom saw his begetter, Leendert—his parents divorced when he was a small-scale boy—and his domineering mother, Cornelia, who tended a succession of confined, constantly moved her family in search of less expensive housing. She regularly beat him. Money was brusque. At the age of 12, he became an apprentice at Gidding and Sons, an elegant firm of artists and craftsmen in the eye of fashionable Rotterdam that specialized in design and decoration. He soon caught the eye of the business firm's owners, who urged him to have classes after work six nights a week at the city's University of Fine Arts.

As a result, de Kooning received a strong grounding in both commercial blueprint and the classical principles of high art. He was precocious; the retrospective at MoMA includes the remarkable Still Life (1917) he fabricated at the Academy at the age of 13. He had to back up himself, however. At the age of 16, de Kooning struck out on his ain, circulating on the bohemian edges of Rotterdam and picking up jobs here and there. He also began to fantasize about America, then regarded past many in Europe as a mythical country of skyscrapers, moving picture stars and easy money—but not, perhaps, of art. When he stowed abroad on the freighter, de Kooning after recalled, he did non think there were whatsoever serious artists in America.

In his commencement years in America, initially in Hoboken, New Jersey, and then in New York, he lived much as he had in Rotterdam, finding work as a commercial artist and occasionally painting in his spare fourth dimension. He found that there were, in fact, serious artists in America, many of whom besides took commercial jobs to survive. He began to spend his fourth dimension in the coffee shops they favored in Chelsea and Greenwich Hamlet, talking away the dark over nickel cups of coffee. Near everyone he knew was poor; the auction of a painting was rare. In this environs, the abiding commitment of certain artists—above all, the devotion of Arshile Gorky to the tradition of modernist painting—had a pronounced impact on de Kooning.

Gorky, an Armenian-born immigrant, had no patience for those who did non commit themselves unreservedly to art. Nor did he have time for those he deemed provincial or minor in their ambitions, such every bit those who romanticized rural America or attacked social injustice. ("Proletariat art," Gorky said, "is poor art for poor people.") In Gorky's view if you were serious, you lot studied the work of modernist masters such as Picasso, Matisse and Miró, and you aspired to equal or amend their accomplish-ment. Contemporaries described Gorky's studio on Union Square as a kind of temple to art. "The great excitement of 36 Union Foursquare," said Ethel Schwabacher, a student and friend of Gorky's, "lay in the feeling it evoked of work washed there, work in progress, day and dark, through long years of passionate, disciplined and dedicated attempt."

Gorky'due south example, together with the creation of the Federal Art Projection, which paid artists a living wage during the Depression, finally led de Kooning to commit himself to existence a total-fourth dimension creative person. In the '30s, Gorky and de Kooning became inseparable; their ongoing discussions most fine art helped each develop into a major painter. De Kooning, struggling to create a fresh kind of figurative art, oft painted wan, melancholy portraits of men and, less ofttimes, women. He worked and reworked the pictures, trying to reconcile his classical training with his modernist convictions. He might allow a picture to leave his studio if a friend bought it, since he was chronically short of cash, only he discarded most of his canvases in disgust.

In the late '30s, de Kooning met a young art student named Elaine Fried. They would marry in 1943. Fried was not only beautiful, her vivacity matched de Kooning's reserve. Never scrimp on the luxuries, she liked to say, the necessities will take care of themselves. One of her friends, the artist Hedda Sterne, described her as a "daredevil." "She believed in gestures without regret, and she delighted in her ain spontaneity and exuberance," Sterne said. "I was a lot of fun," Elaine would later recall. "I mean, a lot of fun." She also considered de Kooning a major artist—well before he became one—which may have bolstered his confidence.

A fresh sensation of the female figure, no doubt inspired by Elaine, began to class through de Kooning'due south art. The color brightened. Boundaries fell away. He no longer seemed constrained by his classical grooming: the women in the paintings now threatened to break out and break apart; distinguishing figure from basis became, in places, difficult. The creative person was beginning to master his ambiguous space. It seemed natural that de Kooning, who instinctively preferred movement to stillness and did not recollect the truth of the effigy lay only in its surface advent, would begin shifting along a continuum from the representational to the abstract. Yet fifty-fifty his most abstract pictures, equally de Kooning scholar Richard Shiff has observed, "either began with a reference to the human figure or incorporated figural elements along the way."

De Kooning'due south movement in the late '40s toward a less realistic depiction of the effigy may have been prompted, in function, by the arrival in the city earlier in the decade of a number of celebrated artists from Paris, notably André Breton and his circumvolve of Surrealists, all refugees from the state of war. De Kooning was not more often than not a fan of Surrealism, only the movement'southward emphasis on the unconscious mind, dreams and the inner life would have reinforced his own impatience with a purely realistic depiction of the world. The Surrealists and their patron, the socialite Peggy Guggenheim, made a big splash in New York. Their very presence inspired ambition in American artists.

Still, de Kooning remained on the margins. The Federal Fine art Projection no longer existed and there was little to no marketplace for modern American art. Information technology was in this dark period that de Kooning began his great serial of black-and-white abstractions. He and his close friend, the painter Franz Kline, unable to afford plush pigments, famously went out one day and bought inexpensive black and white enamel household paint and (co-ordinate to legend) with devil-may-intendance carelessness began turning out major works. Information technology was not, of course, that elementary. De Kooning had labored for many years to attain this moment; and, in a manner, the moment now found him. The horror of World War Ii—and accounts of the Holocaust coming out of Europe—created a new perception among de Kooning and some American artists of a great, if dour, metaphysical scale. (They too had earlier their eyes, in MoMA, Picasso'due south powerful, monochromatic Guernica of 1937, his response to the fascist bombing of the Spanish city.) In contrast to their European contemporaries, the Americans did not alive among the war's ruins, and they came from a culture that historic a Whitmanesque boundlessness. De Kooning, whose city of birth had been pounded into rubble during the war, was both a European and an American, well positioned to make paintings of nighttime grandeur. In 1948, when he was almost 44, he exhibited his then-called "black and whites" at the pocket-size and footling-visited Egan Gallery. Information technology was his first solo show. Few pictures sold, but they were widely noticed and admired by artists and critics.

It was too in the late 1940s that Jackson Pollock began to make his legendary "drip" abstractions, which he painted on the flooring of his studio, weaving rhythmic skeins of paint beyond the sheet. Pollock's paintings, also mainly black and white, had a very unlike character from de Kooning'due south. While generally abstract, de Kooning'southward knotty pictures remained full of glimpsed human parts and gestures; Pollock'south conveyed a transcendent sense of release from the globe. The titles of the ii greatest pictures in de Kooning's black-and-white serial, Attic and Excavation, advise that the creative person does non intend to forget what the world buries or puts bated. (De Kooning no dubiety enjoyed the shifting implications of the titles. Attic, for case, can refer to an actual attic, propose the heights of heaven or recall ancient Greece.) Each painting is full of figurative incident—a turn of shoulder here, a swelling of hip there, just a particular body tin be discerned in neither. "Even abstract shapes," de Kooning said, "must have a likeness."

De Kooning completed Earthworks, his concluding and largest moving-picture show in the series, in 1950. The director of MoMA, Alfred Barr, then selected the painting, along with works by Pollock, Gorky and John Marin, to correspond the U.s. at the Venice Biennale—a signal laurels for all four American modernists. Journalists began to take notice. Pollock was the subject field of a photograph spread in Life magazine in 1949. The light of glory was beginning to focus on what had been an obscure corner of American culture. The Sidney Janis Gallery, which specialized in European masters, now began to pitch de Kooning and other American artists equally worthy successors to Picasso or Mondrian. Critics, curators and art dealers increasingly began to contend that where fine art was concerned, New York was the new Paris.

By the early '50s, De Kooning was a painter of growing renown with a bluish-chip abstruse style. Nigh of his contemporaries believed he would go along to produce paintings in that style. But in one of the near contrary and independent actions in the history of American art, he gave up his black-and-white abstractions to focus mainly, once once again, on the female person effigy. He struggled over a single canvas for almost two years, his friends increasingly concerned for his well-being equally he continually revised and scraped away the image. He finally prepare the painting bated in despair. Just the intervention of the influential art historian Meyer Schapiro, who asked to come across it during a studio visit, persuaded de Kooning to attack the sail once again—and conclude that he had finished Woman I (1950-52). Then, in rapid succession, he completed several more Adult female paintings.

De Kooning described Woman I as a smile goddess—"rather like the Mesopotamian idols," he said, which "always stand upwardly straight, looking to the sky with this smile, similar they were just astonished about the forces of nature...not most bug they had with one another." His goddesses were complicated: at once frightening and hilarious, ancient and gimmicky. Some critics likened them to Hollywood bimbos; others thought them the work of a misogynist. The sculptor Isamu Noguchi, a friend of de Kooning's, recognized their ambivalence: "I wonder whether he really hates women," he said. "Perhaps he loves them besides much." Much of the complication comes from the volatile mixture of vulgarity and a refinement in de Kooning'southward brushwork. "Dazzler," de Kooning once said, "becomes petulant to me. I like the grotesque. It'due south more joyous."

Not surprisingly, de Kooning doubted that his show of recent work in 1953 would exist successful, and the leading fine art critic of the fourth dimension, Cloudless Greenberg, idea de Kooning had taken a wrong turn with the Woman serial. Much to de Kooning's surprise, nevertheless, the prove was a success, not only among many artists but among a public increasingly eager to embrace American painting.

De Kooning suddenly plant himself a star—the offset celebrity, arguably, in the modern American art world. The only painter in the early '50s of comparable or greater stature was Jackson Pollock. But Pollock, then falling into advanced alcoholism, lived mainly in Springs (a village well-nigh Eastward Hampton on Long Island) and was rarely seen in Manhattan. The spotlight therefore focused on de Kooning, who became the center of a lively scene. Many found him irresistible, with his Dutch crewman looks, idiosyncratic broken English and charming accent. He loved American slang. He'd call a picture "terrific" or a friend "a hot potato."

In this hothouse earth, de Kooning had many tangled love affairs, as did Elaine. (They separated in the 1950s, but never divorced.) De Kooning'southward affair with Joan Ward, a commercial creative person, led to the birth, in 1956, of his only child, Lisa, to whom he was always devoted—though he never became much of a twenty-four hours-to-mean solar day father. He besides had a long affair with Ruth Kligman, who had been Pollock's girlfriend and who survived the car crash in 1956 that killed Pollock. Kligman was both an aspiring artist who longed to be the muse to an important painter and a sultry young adult female who evoked stars such every bit Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren. "She really put lead in my pencil," de Kooning famously said.

Following the Adult female serial, de Kooning developed a series of abstractions (the all-time known is Easter Monday) that capture the gritty, churning feel of life in New York City at mid-century. In the later '50s, he simplified his brush stroke. Now, long wide swaths of pigment began to sweep across the canvas. He was spending increasing amounts of time in Springs, where many of his friends had summer places. The pictures of the late '50s oftentimes allude to the light and color of the countryside while containing, of course, figurative elements. Ruth's Zowie (1957) has a kind of declarative élan and confidence. (Kligman provided the title when she entered de Kooning's studio and, seeing the picture, exclaimed "Zowie!") De Kooning himself never learned to drive a car, simply he loved traveling the broad new American highways. In 1959 the art globe mobbed the gallery opening of what is sometimes called his highway series: big, boldly stroked landscapes.

De Kooning was never entirely comfortable as a celebrity. He ever remained, in function, a poor boy from Rotterdam. (When he was introduced to Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III, who had just bought Woman II, he hemmed and hawed and so blurted out, "Yous look similar a million bucks!") Like many of his contemporaries, he began drinking heavily. At the peak of his success toward the end of the 1950s, de Kooning was a rampage drinker, sometimes disappearing for more than a week at a time.

In the '50s, many young artists had imitated de Kooning; critics chosen them "2d generation" painters—that is, followers of pioneers like de Kooning. In the '60s, all the same, the art world was rapidly changing as Pop and Minimal artists such equally Andy Warhol and Donald Judd brought a cool and knowing irony to art that was foreign to de Kooning's lush sensibility. These young artists did not want to be "second generation," and they began to dismiss the older painter'south work as too messy, personal, European or, every bit de Kooning might put information technology, former hat.

In 1963, as de Kooning approached the age of 60, he left New York Metropolis for Springs with Joan Ward and their girl. His life on Long Island was difficult. He was given to melancholy, and he resented being treated like a painter left behind by history. He however went on periodic benders, which sometimes concluded with his admission to Southampton Hospital. But his art continued to develop in extraordinary new ways.

De Kooning immersed himself in the Long Island countryside. He congenital a big, eccentric studio that he likened to a ship, and he became a familiar figure around Springs, bicycling down the sandy roads. His figurative piece of work of the '60s was often disturbing; his taste for caricature and the grotesque, apparent in Woman I, was likewise institute in such sexually charged works as The Visit (1966-67), a moisture and juicy picture of a grinning frog-adult female lying on her back. In his more abstract pictures, the female person body and the landscape increasingly seemed to fuse in the loose, watery paint.

De Kooning also began making extraordinarily tactile figurative sculptures: Clamdigger (1972) seemed pulled from the primordial ooze. The paintings that followed, such as ...Whose Name was Writ in H2o (1975), were no less tactile but did non have the aforementioned muddiness. Ecstatic eruptions of water, light, reflection, paint and actual sensation—perchance a reflection, in role, of de Kooning'south passion for the last swell love of his life, Emilie Kilgore—the paintings expect similar nothing else in American art. And yet, in the late '70s, de Kooning abruptly, and typically, concluded the series. The pictures, he said, were coming as well hands.

Information technology was too in the late '70s that de Kooning first began exhibiting signs of dementia. His married woman, Elaine, who came back into his life at this time, began to monitor him advisedly. Increasingly, equally the '80s wore on, he would depend on administration to move his canvases and lay out his paints. Some critics have disparaged the increasingly spare paintings of this period. Elderfield, nonetheless, treats the late style with respect. In the best of the late works, de Kooning seems to be post-obit his hand, the inimitable brush stroke freed of any burden and yet lively equally ever. "And so there is a fourth dimension in life," he said in 1960, as he wearied of New York City, "when yous simply take a walk: And you walk in your own mural."

De Kooning died on March 19, 1997, at his Long Island studio, at the age of 92. He traveled an enormous altitude during his long life, moving between Europe and America, old main and modernist, metropolis and country. De Kooning's art, said the painter Robert Nuance, "ever seems to be proverb goodbye." De Kooning himself liked to say, "Yous have to change to stay the aforementioned."

Marking Stevens is the co-author, with his wife Annalyn Swan, of the Pulitzer Prize-winning de Kooning: An American Master.