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Willem de Kooning at Ninety
| Article
# : |
11418 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1994 |
2,190 Words |
| Author
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Eric Gibson
Eric Gibson, art critic for the Washington Times, last wrote
on Henry Ossewa Tanner in the September 1991 issue of The
World & I. |
Now is the time of Willem de Kooning. Born ninety years ago this month, the Abstract Expressionist pioneer has become the subject of an extensive round of museum and media attention. Last year the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., mounted a large selection of founder Joseph H. Hirshhorn s de Koomng acquisitions, an impressive purchasing record that produced a fairly representative survey of the artist s entire career.
Less happily, last year also saw the publication of Lee Hall s Elaine and Bill: Portrait of Marriage, a tawdry, through-the-keyhole view of the on-again, off-again relationship between de Kooning and his painter wife, Elaine. You d hardly have known they were painters, from the book. Hall s narrative reduced them both to philandering alcoholics who occasionally found time to participate in the art life of their time.
In May, the National Galleiy of Art in Washington opens a full-scale de Kooning retrospective, the most ambitious and comprehensive survey of the artist s career since the one organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1983.
Born in Rotterdam on April 24, 1904, de Kooning emigrated to the United States when he was twenty-two, taking up residence in New York City. He is perhaps best known for his Women paintings of the early 1950s fren-ziedly painted frontal images of luridly grinning nude women. Although they were greeted at the time variously as betrayals of the prevailing abstract orthodoxy and viciously misogrnistic images of the female sex, de Kooning s aims were far more straightforward. These paintings, he said, were merely updated versions of such established, archetypaL female images as the prehistoric Willendorf Venus.
But de Kooning s career has been more complex, more layered, than these works suggest. It started with paintings in the 1930s of brooding isolated men and women that fused the hard outlines and clear drawing of Ingres with the flattened, dislocated forms of Picasso and the Cubists. At the same time, he was painting almost totally abstract still lifes that drew on Mir?and Arp. A particularly important phase of his development occurred in the 1940s when, fusing lessons of Cubism and Surrealism, de Kooning made a numher of paintings in which densely packed, abstract imagery was ruthlessly compressed into a flattened, structured pictorial space. The result was a number of seething, flickering abstractions, such as the Phillips Collection s Ashville (1949), the Metropolitan Museum of Art s Attic (1949), and Excavation (1950) in the Art
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