Art
Physical contact
John McEwen
It is a rare and inspiring sight to see contemporary art of the calibre of Willem de • Kooning's paintings at the Serpentine (till 8 January). The exhibition is entitled The sculptures o fde Kooning, with related paintings, drawings and lithographs, but while the sculptures are astonishing in certain cases, they are chiefly of interest as the work of one of the masters of twentieth-century painting recklessly extending his range in the full confidence of his maturity.
It is amusing to think of de Kooning's paintings being subordinated in this way to some frail academic framework of understanding, 'related paintings' indeed! And wisest to trust his words and observations and leave those of his catalogue interviewer, Harold Rosenberg (in very dull form), for the birds.
What does one get? References to Rubens (de Kooning is the most akin to the spirit of Rubens — the gusto, the physical energy and sensuality — of contemporary painters); a telling quote of Cezanne's 'that every brushstroke has its own perspective'; and a variety of insights into his own work: his desire to make big paintings that are also intimate, his eclecticism, his love of water and the sea. He hints, but Rosenberg is too nervous to inquire further, that the dis tortions of water reflections were the prototypes of his famous abstractions of women. And now once again, out by the ocean on Long Island, at Springs, where Pollock also had a house, he reflects upon 'the reflections on the water, like the fishermen do' and tries to paint in touch with nature. The titles begin as 'figures in landscapes' and then become 'untitled', pure expressions of physical contact with the elements. There are two fine examples in the exhibition, large paintings displaying the full sweep of his arm hut teeming with controlled detail, no hesitancy, no blurring or loss of colour despite the paint being applied wet on wet. And, of course, something of this energy invests his bronzes, the primal clay gouged, chopped, sliced and squeezed into quite identifiableexpressions of the figure. Too identifiable, because the demiurgency of his late paintings has been contrived by an integration of the figurative elements of his earlier work, and now with sculpture he is forced to be more prosaic by the very nature of the medium, however forcefully he handles it. Paintings with related sculptures and drawings will always be the order, with those lithographs, the least physically expressive of the mediums involved, the last and poorest relation of all, Roy Lichtenstein, another painter exhibiting bronzes in the style of his paintings, at the new Mayor Gallery premises at 22a Cork Street (till 20 December), is a much cooler character. In the 'sixties he devulgarised the imagery of pulp comics by wittily, sometimes tenderly, exposing and exaggerating the aesthetic conventions from which they derived. Then, as a fine irony,*he began to vulgarise these same aesthetic conventions by exposing and exaggerating them in terms of the imagery , of pulp comics.
Man Ray wrapped an object as a surrealist gesture, and then early in the war Henry Moore did one of his best drawings of a wrapped monument. Christo (Annely Juda till 10 December) has, unknowingly perhaps, turned their random inspirations into a self-generating artform. His art lies in making the familiar unfamiliar, and is undoubtedly best seen in the raw. He does not just 'wrap' things, of course, but his latest project is a wraparound one — to par cel up the Reichstag. The drawings for this scheme and some news photographs of the negotiations in hand, plus a wrapped model, constitute the present show. Christo's draw ingsare more emotional than straight architectural ones, note the dramatic black ness of his Berlin Wall, but they are fairly pedantic nonetheless, and his claim that the negotiations are the real art only makes one doubt his own understanding of what he is doing. It is not enough for him to create spectacular and, lam sure, beautiful effects; being Romanian he must be seen to be 'political' too. That is the trouble with the present project. Wrapping up the Reichstag is of little aesthetic interest and politically banal as a gesture. It is a big enough white elephant as it is.
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