Masculine, Yet Inviting Style
While his subject matter changed during the course of his career, the prolific de Kooning was probably the most down-to-earth and irreverent artist in the New York School. He loved real women, including Marilyn Monroe, and cartoon women, including Betty Boop and Minnie Mouse. Four clownish paintings along one wall seem to incorporate characteristics of all three: Minnie's oversized white cuffs, Marilyn's high heels (de Kooning liked heels), and Betty's black, flapper-girl bob. Here, de Kooning seems to have used his method of using one painting to make the next, and the next, and the next.
One grouping in the exhibition exemplifies de Kooning's daring use of color, painting number XV [no title, 1980], and its corresponding tracing, number XVI [no title, c. 1980]. In the painting, for example, de Kooning's use of shear, lip-gloss strokes in deep, rosy reds are contrasted with colors of coral and a sea-like green. Bits of the coral color are also seen in the tracing done in charcoal on vellum.
Celebrating de Kooning's aggressively masculine, yet inviting style, Willem de Kooning: A Process underscores the artist's truly modernist contribution to the abstract expressionist school. Though his style would eventually evolve, forty years ago, de Kooning was at the epicenter of something grand in the world of modern art. He was probably also the last of the true American modernists.
(This article can also be found on National Review Online.)
“So preoccupied with the process was Willem de Kooning that he signed his paintings only when they had to leave his studio and almost never dated them,” said Klaus Kertess, the exhibition's curator. “No artist of his generation, nor perhaps of any other, engaged in and made so visible procedures of creating that were as rich, complex, playful and malleable as did [he].”
In fact, most of de Kooning's works on display around the world are tracings. Using tracing paper, and later, large sheets of vellum, the artist copied various elements and incorporated them into subsequent works. When not making direct tracings, de Kooning would place sheets of paper on a wet canvas to soak up the excess oil, using this method from the 1950s through the late 1970s as a starting point for new paintings.
The Corcoran's exhibition shows the similarities between tracing and painting, arranging both the tracing and painting in complementary positions. Looking from tracing to painting, one can often make out the same bit of curve, an identical line, or shade of color. And, as Mr. Kertess noted, de Kooning never entertained a preconceived notion of how any one of his paintings would turn out. One need only examine the catalog accompanying the exhibition to appreciate this. In any series of pictures, it is almost impossible to see what de Kooning was thinking in the first stage of a painting when looking at the last stage.
The Birth of American Modernism
The first wave of American modernism began in 1913-14, and ended in the 1940s. At first the critics guffawed. They were at times hostile or indifferent to the method, theory, and insouciant attitude of the modernists. Museums, galleries, collectors, and critics were similarly unimpressed.
Thus De Kooning and other members of the New York School found themselves fated to live and work on the fringes of American cultural life. It wasn't until the outset of World War II that the artists of the New York School gained the public recognition and artistic influence that they continue to enjoy today. And it wasn't until New York City replaced Paris as the art metropolis of the world that de Kooning and his fellow travelers jumped onto the international scene.
Tracing and Painting
Willem de Kooning: In Process, which opened earlier this month at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., presents a glimpse of the artist's laborious technique. This is the first exhibition to focus exclusively on de Kooning's technical methods from 1970 to 1987, in particular, his method of tracing. Many of the 20 paintings and eight drawings, featuring the artist's weakness for swirls of color, are being shown here for the first time.
Writer Robert Coates first used the term, abstract expressionism, to describe contemporary painting in a 1946 issue of the New Yorker. Harold Rosenberg called abstract expressionism “wallpaper” by action painters in The American Action Painters. And the critic Clement Greenberg described abstract expressionism with the words “American-style painting.” But none of these things depicts de Kooning's technique.
De Kooning's works, for instance, share little visually with Pollock's dripped and poured-paint canvases, or Rothko's bravura, landscape-like fields. Describing de Kooning with a simple moniker is elusive, in part because he shifted continually between painting and drawing, often tracing, reusing, and recycling his creations.
