Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

This is the second part of MAN’s review of “de Kooning: A Retrospective” at the Museum of Modern Art. Part one is here.

Willem de Kooning’s next great series of Woman paintings started in late 1950. That October, MoMA presented a major retrospective of Chaim Soutine, the Belarusian-French painter who loaded up his brush with oil paint as if canvas was an enemy that must be smothered.

As I argued yesterday, by the time de Kooning saw the Soutine show he was already in the throes of full-field compositions — he had finished or was almost finished with Excavation and he had established his all-over mastery via  Asheville (1948), Attic (1949) and Painting (1949-50).

Art historians have oft noted that de Kooning was fascinated by MoMA’s Soutine show. In Woman (1948) and a related set of paintings, de Kooning measured himself up against Matisse and Picasso. Apparently he felt he did pretty well, because after seeing Soutine, de Kooning took his next big leap.

De Kooning seems to have been particularly taken with the landscapes Soutine painted around the French town of Ceret, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. In many of those paintings — about 200 in all — Soutine used a wet, loaded brush to slather the surrounding trees, hills and homes in such a way that they filled every inch of his canvases. This seems to have given de Kooning faith that he was on the right track. After Soutine,  de Kooning’s paint becomes wetter and looser, bigger, lusher and braver. He learned that distorting elements in a painting could create dramatic new effects.

That trick of Soutines, plus what de Kooning saw in Soutine’s paintings of cow carcasses and hanging fowl that seem to push up against the picture plane, gave him new ideas. In 1950 de Kooning’s paintings of women grew bigger. He discarded the chairs in which he had previously put women and spread out ogresses across canvases. In order to achieve the full-field reach that he’d been pursuing for much of the previous decade, de Kooning linked their figures to the edges of the canvases not with sunbursts or the arms of chairs, but with simple and increasingly abstract brushstrokes. In Woman I (1950-52), de Kooning extends his figure’s left shoulder to the edge of the canvas with a few determined, flesh-colored-giving-way-to-grey brushstrokes. For Woman VI, the best painting in this batch, de Kooning binds the figure to the perimeter with brisk patches of pink and green. The suburst of the 1948 Woman has been stripped down to a yellow-and-grey triangle which reaches its point just below the upper-left of the painting.

As great as the towering, five-and-six-foot-tall early 1950s Woman paintings are (six  are in the exhibition, the Nelson-Atkins’ Woman IV is absent), they’re almost over-shadowed by a wall of Woman-related works on paper that stare them down from across the gallery. As I noted in part one, curator John Elderfield has smartly included de Kooning’s drawings and sketches throughout his exhibition. They’re almost-all fantastic, a strong argument for a de Kooning works-on-paper show. The best may be Two Women with Still Life (1952, above right) from MOCA’s collection. Smaller than two-feet-square and installed across from MoMA’s Woman I, it somehow overshadows de Kooning’s most famous painting. (The drawing may be a study for this painting, on view now at the preposterously de Kooning-rich Hirshhorn.)

De Kooning’s final great series of women came over 10 years later, after a decade in which de Kooning made a tremendous series of colorful abstractions. The 1960s paintings of women mark a return to Soutine after a decade away. This time de Kooning seems to have been particularly fascinated by Soutine’s paintings of  splayed carcasses. The women in these paintings, which Elderfield has installed in a remarkable single gallery that is so intense that you practically want to bathe on your way out, are spread and available. The paint is wet, heavy and languidly flicked into space by broad, rounded brushstrokes.

Scholars have oft tied these paintings to how pornography took a more graphic, open turn in the early 1960s and that the emergent Penthouse-style of presentation may have motivated de Kooning’s later women, such as Woman (1964-65, at left) and Woman, Sag Harbor (1963). Even if I think there’s more Soutine (and late Picasso) here than Guccione, it’s easy to understand that reading: In both of those paintings, the women fill, completely fill, the top seven-eights of the painting, breasts here, the vavoom of womanly hips there. The figures are tied to the edges of the canvas with a couple of quick swipes of the brush. However this time the women are often not tethered to the bottom of the field. It’s almost as if there’s room for the viewer, as if the women are inviting us to jump on in. They are lubricious.

In the late 1960s de Kooning painted his last women. (The last ones at MoMA are from 1969, though there are figurative elements in later works.) For the last 25 years of his life he made sculpture and painted large abstractions. He never again approached the greatness he achieved in his figurative paintings.

Related: Part one of my review. The mystery of the missing de Kooning: Where’s Woman IV?

When the Museum of Modern Art devotes 18,000 square feet of space to about 200 artworks by a single artist, it is effectively arguing that artist belongs in the penthouse of the pantheon of modern art.

So: Does Willem de Kooning, now receiving the full retrospective treatment from MoMA and curator John Elderfield, merit the star treatment? You bet. “De Kooning: A Retrospective” is a superlative exhibition. (Its catalogue is equally fantastic.) The show makes an overwhelming case that de Kooning was America’s greatest figurative painter, and that any discussion of the greatest artists of the century — Picasso, Matisse, Pollock, Judd, Warhol — must include him.

Elderfield effectively argues that the case for de Kooning is based on the work he did between the early 1940s and the late 1960s. By liberally sprinkling de Kooning’s drawings throughout the first 40-odd years of the exhibition Elderfield suggests that de Kooning’s work on paper stands up to his canvases. It does.

One of Elderfield’s best curatorial decisions was to lightly skip through the lesser, later abstract paintings that de Kooning made after the 1960s. Those works are typically large so they still occupy several galleries, but ultimately Elderfield offers  just 25 paintings from the last 27 years of de Kooning’s life. (For the sake of comparison, Elderfield shows about twice that many works from just one peak decade, the 1940s.)

The emphasis on de Kooning’s top years allows Elderfield to focus on de Kooning’s signature innovation, on what made de Kooning great: His marriage of the emergent American interest in full-field composition, manifest destiny of the canvas as explored by Westerners such as Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still and later by Adolph Gottlieb and Arshile Gorky, with the European interest in the figure.

When he wanted to be, de Kooning was also a top-notch abstract painter. The mostly and sometimes entirely black-and-white abstractions de Kooning made in the late 1940s, represented at MoMA by more than two dozen works, are among the finest abstractions ever painted. When discussing the greatest American abstraction, de Kooning’s late ’40s painting ranks right up there with Pollock’s drips, Still’s scything canyons, Mark Rothko’s color clouds, Barnett Newman’s cinematic fields, John Marin’s landscape-based watercolors and Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings. [Image: de Kooning, Painting, 1948. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art.]

But finding — creating, really — a unified theory that merged one of Europe’s great painting traditions with the innovations beginning to happen in America is what sets de Kooning apart. Other artists played on the same field — Still’s Western-landscape-rooted abstractions were motivated in part by the way Rembrandt and Cezanne handled paint and for a time Pollock tried to Americanize European religious painting — but de Kooning took on the broadest European tradition in the most focused way and found a way to tie it to an American vanguard increasingly obsessed with something else (pure abstraction).

De Kooning’s interest in all-over compositions is first evident in early-1940s geometric abstractions such as Pink Landscape (c.1942, at right) , a painting in which de Kooning painted a thin black rectangle near the periphery of a piece of composition board so as to define his field and then proceeded to fill it with not-quite-familiar shapes. In other paintings from about the same time, including Summer Couch (1943) and The Wave (1942-44) de Kooning seems to be consciously avoiding then-ubiquitous biomorphism in favor of painting-stuffing splotches of color.

After those works, de Kooning begins to merge his interest in the figure with American-style composition. One of the revelations of MoMA’s exhibition is how often de Kooning used Matisse as his bridge to Europe, especially in his paintings of the 1940s.

The early de Kooning masterpiece Queen of Hearts (1943-46, above) is a particularly good example. It features a woman in what seems at first a fairly typical three-quarter view, but with the sitter’s far shoulder launched above the rest of her body, a mirror of how Matisse used a similar pose in The Embroidered Dark Blouse (1936). (For centuries European painters have masked cribs by using a mirror version of what they borrow. De Kooning too.) Next, de Kooning doesn’t just position his sitter in space, as Matisse did when he presented Greta Prozor or Olga Merson in three-quarter view. Instead de Kooning uses the three-quarter view to extend the figure from one side of the canvas to the other, to begin to fill the field.

Most astonishing of all is the way in which de Kooning melds his subject’s near shoulder into the pink background and into her pink hair, a move he likely adapted from Matisse’s The Italian Woman (1916, at left), wherein Matisse extends the background of the painting over his sitter’s shoulder and hair. (Again: De Kooning uses Matisse’s trick on the opposite side of his model.) But while Matisse — and most painters until now — are happy to focus the viewer’s attention on the sitter, de Kooning isn’t done. As he moves through the 1940s, he fills corners. Here he flanks his Queen with rectangles of color, rectangles that recall the way Matisse filled space and added faux-depth to paintings (and particularly drawings) by using mirrors and the way that Picasso stuffed Matisse’s mirrors into corners of paintings.

De Kooning’s next great painting — his greatest, period — is Woman (1948), the painting that initiated his most intense five-year study of the female figure. The 1948-53 series of about a dozen Womans (and the related works on paper) is one of the great bursts in Western art, a remarkable series during which de Kooning synthesized seemingly everything he’d studied until then. Suddenly his figures are no longer serene, instead they’re hard-fought and eventually flattened, scratched, pushed and spread. (Later, in the 1960s, they’d be splayed, too.)

The 1948 Woman, which, like Queen of Hearts, is in the collection of the Hirshhorn, started it all. It may be the most underrated painting of the post-war period. In large part because ARTnews editor (and later Metropolitan curator) Tom Hess helped make Woman I a publishing-event in the pages of his magazine — and probably because it is at MoMA and the 1948 painting is in Washington – Woman I is more famous.  Most recently, the Hirshhorn Woman was the subject of about one page in Mark Stevens’ and Annalyn Swan’s fantastic 2004 de Kooning biography. Woman I received about 20 times as much space.

The Hirshhorn Woman marks the debut of the demonic toothy grin that de Kooning would use as a signifier of womanly presence in seemingly abstract canvases such as Excavation and the menacing eye or eyes that would recur on de Kooning’s Womans for years, Picasso’s stare gone expressionist.

De Kooning uses every trick he can think of to tease out a seated woman to fill the whole picture: A mysterious star-like sunburst in the upper left and a pentagon-shaped framed mirror (?) in the upper-right team up to fill the space to either side of the sitter’s head.  Where else in Western art does a woman sit with one leg apparently crossed horizontally, a clever painterly trick that fills out much of the bottom quarter of the painting? De Kooning also opens up the chair, flatting it against the picture plane so much that the two arms each come within an inch or two of touching the two outer edges of the canvas.

If there’s a painting that indicates de Kooning believes he’s transitioned into the big leagues of modern art, this is it. He unabashedly loads up Woman with references to the two painters with whom he’s measuring himself up, Picasso and Matisse: The woman’s dress is pink-ish purple, almost exactly the color with which Picasso marked Marie-Therese Walter. (Speaking of whom: Marie-Therese was yellow-haired too.) De Kooning gives his sitter unusually elastic limbs, probably a reference to the late-1920s paintings in which Matisse and Picasso conversed through Gumby-like seated women. The disappearing-shoulder trick de Kooning borrowed from Matisse’s Italian Woman is back for an encore (this time on the same side of the canvas as it was in the Matisse), as is a yellow chair, an indication that de Kooning probably noticed how oft Matisse put his sitter in yellow chairs. Finally, in the lower-left corner, de Kooning seems to insert himself into the painting via a rectangular patch of white, a signifier of a palette (or in this case perhaps a sketch-pad) that Matisse and Picasso famously used to nod toward with each other in Goldfish and Palette (1914) and Harlequin (1915), respectively. Again, de Kooning masks his crib-cum-hat-tip, putting it on the opposite side of the canvas from Matisse and Picasso .

De Kooning made several other Woman paintings before late 1950, when he visited a show that would change his art forever. I’ll pick up there tomorrow.

Part two is here.