De Kooning's pink angels ARTS
BRYAN ROBERTSON
At the present time, as I often complain, there is a good deal of work around which is called 'didactic' and rather like the kind of painting or sculpture that an art critic might make if he could actually project his analytical arguments into solid, physical terms: the facture as demonstration piece, in fact, and damn dull a lot of it is too. Half a century ago, Henry James said in more elaborate terms than I can recall that there is a certain kind of work of art which is so ushered in by struc- tural analysis, aesthetic dissection and general explanation that the final effect is not unlike having a dinner guest arrive on your doorstep escorted by policemen.
It is with these baleful thoughts in mind, therefore, that I welcome with open arms and a beaming face the Willem de Kooning retro- spective exhibition at the Tate Gallery, where it has just arrived from Holland, de Kooning's native country. But America has been de Kooning's home since 1926 and it is, of course, within the dimensions of American painting" that his work is usually considered: the present show is circulated by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. After -the physically unsatisfying and imaginatively cerebral nature of so much work in the 1960s. de Kooning's paintings have now the bracing allure of an open window letting in fresh air and the com- fortably human reassurance of an unmade bed that conjures up fragmented memories of friendly activity. He paints mostly landscape and girls.
But before too many false hopes are raised, I'd better qualify all this by adding that de Kooning's work is usually, though not invari- ably, inclined to a certain kind of radiant harsh- ness in colour and that his formal exploration, though complex and expansive, is tempered in the long run by astringency and a certain frugality or economy. There is also an inter- mittent chord of satire: he is very good at catching something of the theatricality of women: the mask, the maquillage, the loops and pulleys of brassieres and girdles, the jangly bracelets and the vivacious grimace, above all the crazy upright stance and sprawl- ingly improbable reclining posture, if caught off-guard—and de Kooning's women are rather more than off-guard, they're mildly off-key and come back at you, teeth bared in manic grin, off-balance.
The effect in many works is of a fero- cious cheerfulness in which smack-bottom playfulness has actually dislocated a buttock Of WO, here and there, so bristlingly nervous and galvanic are these tender pugilists. Loving, sensuous, and warmly erotic as many of these limber nudes are, they sometimes also bring to mind that crucified aspect of the plucked and trussed-up broiler hen. You're not sure, either, if that suspender belt is a weapon or a decoration. If Rubens caught, robustly, the element of fecundity in women, de Kooning traps, far more wickedly, their animated re- sponse to an endless series of erotic entangle- ments from which anything might spring except Motherhood.
In terms of art history, what de Kooning
has done so far, and magnificently, is to ex- tend the act of painting from Van Gogh, Manet, and the Impressionists into a vastly expanded area in which the brush marks are even more loaded9 larger, and certainly more eloquent, in their own right. This comes from the way in which the paint itself is made to sit on the canvas—not to rest there—or is dragged across its surface with a half-dry brush, or spattered on to the canvas, or slowly caresses a shape into being which is never divisible from the soft brushwork that creates it, or explodes, detonates another part into existence with staccato, slashing daubs which convey a sensation of breakneck speed.
A de Kooning painting is sometimes, super- ficially, a record of a battle as much as any- thing else and the fight takes place in terms of suppression as much as invocation: de Kooning likes to arrive, and he relishes depar- ture—many works are part-erased; he is not interested in a fixed and static state of being, flux is all. The paintings are correspondingly very often tough on the eye: de Kooning's space is generally shallow and exceedingly dense, filled to the point of claustrophobia with involved incident, -detail, the nervous scrabble and meanderingly thick line of a continuously explored structure. There is practically no repose, only an equivocal final moment of resolution—and even this has something of a temporary air about it, a provisional equation between colour and form, expressed as a con- tinuous present.
De Kooning is such an original artist that I do not want to play the game of influences in trying to help the reader to locate his work. Whatever de Kooning's point of departure may have been, he has travelled a very long way with total independence and the absolute assurance of a bravura painter in the tradition of van Dyck or Franz Hals. Some insights were certainly gleaned from Picasso, particu- larly the 1936-38 crucifixion paintings and his sex-pain images derived from Grunwald which were first published in Minotaur (also affecting Bacon, Sutherland and a host of other figura- tive artists); these insights were notably re- fined by contact with. Arshile Gorky, who sweetened them, made them more abstractly clear and purposeful—and who floats like an exotic ghost in the Noh plays behind so much mid-century American painting; and my refer- ences to Rubens and Van Gogh may serve to underline the fact that de Kooning is very much a northern artist, rooted firmly in the European tradition.
The word 'traditional' has such absurdly mis- calculated undertones these days, wrongly synonymous with 'reactionary' or 'academic.' It is, of course, the academy which corrupts tradition, that great organism which changes endlessly, continuously transformed by the spontaneous pressures of the original artist who, in faithfully reflecting himself in his art, leaves also the fresh imprint of his own society. De Kooning has extended the European tradi- tion of painting with grace and honour. What- ever I have said to qualify his art should serve only to identify it: these qualifications are
also his formidable strengths. His 'northern' colour, brilliant but cold, is not unlike the primary reds, blues and yellows of Mondrian or Van Gogh: the colour of northern land- scape in winter sunlight on a clear day. It is a pleasure to consider that the brilliant blue Dutch barns which erupt in the yellow. brownstubble of the fields in Holland in winter have rough counterparts in the bright signs and bric-i-brac which clutter the semi-urban- ised fiercely brilliant landscapes of Connec- ticut, Pennsylvania or Ontario in winter, or summer.
I should also say that de Kooning's re- cent work shows no slackening of the pace whatever, only a further gain in concentration and a lightening of colour; and that his black-and-white paintings of the late 'forties, and those which followed with flashes of half-buried colour added, are among the most enthralling inventions of the century. Excava- tion 1950 is a masterpiece and so is Pink Angels.
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