From The Studio: De Kooning's Coda
Death gave the final edge to the shape of Willem de Kooning's life, a wonderful life of struggle and fulfillment.
Obituaries, memoirs, reports of every detail of the dignified funeral and elegant reception at the vast, spectacular Springs studio where he worked for more than 30 years appeared by the score as hungry writers and photographers feasted on the rich remains and friends elbowed to gain recognition for their places in the great man's life.
The thinking about de Kooning and his meaning both as an artist and as our zeitgeist - the spirit of the time - has only just begun.
Cultural Stardom
Perhaps it can only begin and begin again, just as he would do in his painting. There is no ending. It is a self-perpetuating subject, much larger than the self-serving anecdotes that mark too many of the recollections avalanching the media since his passing on March 19.
For an intensely private and personal abstract artist, an enigma understood by few, he has, amazingly, become a popular hero. Along with Jackson Pollock, he has attained indestructible cultural stardom in the American art constellation, comparable to that of the legendary Babe Ruth in baseball.
And as if that weren't enough, he is a rags-to-riches role model, America's favorite kind of American star.
Last February, an exhibit of work from the last decade of de Kooning's life opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the final stop, through April 29, in a year-and-a-half tour of the United States and abroad.
Change In Style
It covers the period during which his painting style underwent a startling change, from intense, feverish, lavishly layered and multidirectioned strokes in colors of his own invention, to beautiful, doodle-like, floating, swerving, long, unbroken, circling outlines of primary color - red, yellow, blue - like an ice-skater's arabesques, thinned-out and transparent ribbons of paint on a white ground.
From the short scrub, the lurch, the stumble, the slide, the hook, the slash of the '60s and '70s, he went to the long, dangerous, sustained flight. From the fling-and-sting attack, he came to this, almost as a caress - and, as always, both slow and fast at the same time.
Critical Breach
As controversial as the brilliant Abstract Expressionist work had been, the abrupt change in style has equally provoked arguments, scrutiny, and questions, of a different nature perhaps, yet consistent in pitch, passion, and polarities with all the art world reaction to de Kooning's work at each period of change.
The excellent essay by Robert Storr of MoMA for the current show's catalogue practically equates the late paintings with de Kooning's final arrival at his Holy Grail. The critic Hilton Kramer, whose vehement attack in The New York Observer appeared on the day the artist died, brands them as junk.
The breach is no less among artists, from Chuck Close, who believes in the resolution de Kooning found in his new period, to Susan Rothenberg, who discounts the paintings as vacuous.
Questions
The questions continue:
Is the change due to the Alz heimer's disease that was claiming the mind of the aging artist?
Is there a missing link? Is there no link at all?
Do the late works, as Mr. Kramer accuses, belong less to the history of the artist than to the history of the art market?
Should these paintings be treated as a separate issue or as an outgrowth of the previous work? Or both?
Would we care as much about them if they had not been made by Willem de Kooning?
If we could choose a painting from the de Kooning oeuvre, from which period would it be?
Artist In His Art
This critic, although fiercely devoted to the artist and his art, finds herself still on the fence with the last works. Bill de Kooning would like that. He liked to keep things open, everything a possibility. He liked changes of mind and contradictions and paradox.
All the same, de Kooning's place as an intensely autobiographical painter in the fragmentation and ironies of a besieged present is no less ingrained in the late paintings than in all his work.
The paintings are compelling because he was compelling - brilliant and dumb at the same time, rendering the self in all its knowing and not knowing, its contradictions, insights and lost-ness, as his subject.
And always the relish of the pigment and the brush, and everything he could make it do. His sheer skill and craftsmanship - love for his materials and tools - was as much the subject as what he was thinking about or not thinking at the moment of his act of art.
Never has the self been marked out more directly and more densely. The crux of his greatness for me is in the way he brought up his image from the blind inside and bound it, however raw and ferocious, into equilibrium with the paint.
He Did What He Could
Considering the current Whitney Biennial (which, ironically, had its press preview on the day de Kooning died), with its forecast of the brand-new bubble-gum aesthetic, Willem de Kooning - the quintessential expression of Western painting - may well have taken it with him.
In the last works, he did what he could do, just as he always did. As he felt his mind slip, he allowed the sheer pleasure and the necessary habit of painting to take over.
He had passed the crisis of self. The self could no longer be an issue, so, being the practical and pragmatic Dutchman that he was, he settled for doing what he could - stop the torture and, for as long as he could, render the joy.
Conversation In 1984
"Just because you're getting older doesn't mean you're doing it better," de Kooning told me in 1984. "But you can't stop. You just can't stop yourself to find out, or you might stop, period."
"And the hardest thing is to begin again after you stop. As long as it goes, you go with it, even though you don't know where you're going, because you never know. You never did know. You just keep leaving from where you've been, and you go with it and you keep on going. Just like you always did."
We were sitting in the Adirondack rocking chairs, our eyes on the large canvas he was working on, with its swooping, swirling lines, at the other end of the studio.
Transitions
He wasn't referring in particular to the new series, but rather answering my questions about his transitions from figuration to abstraction, from landscape to the movement of water and the sea, and the mixture of abstraction with imagery, characteristic of his entire oeuvre.
Prime germinal figure of Abstract Expressionism (along with Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko), his shift to what has been referred to as his "old-age" style was certainly in evidence, not only in the painting on the easel but in the many stacked up against columns and bins all over the palatial place.
While his answer certainly applied to the new work, it essentialized the momentum and attitudes of his entire life. Above all, it expressed the ultimately practical, pragmatic temperament of the tough and tenacious Willem de Kooning, whose spirit infuses the very same studio on Woodbine Drive in Springs where we sat and talked on that indelible day.
At the time, he was just 80. He would paint for another six years before he "drifted away from his brushes and pigment," as Mr. Storr puts it.
Prolific Decade
With his style having become more relaxed and glib, the last decade of his painting life was the most prolific of de Kooning's entire career.
The tension and angst so central to his work was gone from the new series. They were easier to do, faster for the "slipping glimpser," as he called himself, to slip out of. It was what he could do at the time, and so that is what he did.
As entrapped in meaning as the pre-'80s works are, so liberated from the burden of meanings are those of the '80s. Having plumbed the depths and the meaning of flesh - its movement, spirit, and chaos - de Kooning now painted the movements of air, of flight, of song.
The late paintings also appear to trace the structure and trajectory of the early ones, as if now, in studying de Kooning with some distance, he wants to analyze what he did 40 years before.
The tension and angst so central to his work was gone from the new series. As entrapped in meaning as the pre-'80s works are, so liberated from the burden of meanings are those of the '80s.
I compared a 1988 painting at MoMA to "Asheville" of 1948. In its very contradiction of forms and surface there is a relationship, natural to de Kooning as a conclusive demonstration of madness and method, a final revelation of his love for polarity, for opposites, for the hot, quivering little "yes" behind the cold, firm, big "no."
I would like to see these paintings placed close to the beginnings to see how the wheel came round, how it shakes down after the struggle is over.
Powerful Brushstrokes
It was de Kooning's habit to bicycle from his studio down to Louse Point and watch the sky, the quiet horizon, the setting sun, the flight track of the gulls in space. In the end, it would be his metaphor. Everything he painted was rooted in the flesh of the real world. And he turned everything into paint, just as a writer turns everything into words.
His brushstrokes were the secret of his art. Previously, each and every one could be more than a whole painting. Each beautiful brushstroke was like a soliloquy as it snapped back into itself, as it drew itself into full power, like an ocean wave as it weaves back and forth before it heaves down.
Improvisation and spontaneity were the tools of his intuition. In his very inability to resolve the conflict, he shows the authenticity of his art, a war of the selves - his lyric nature and the adventurous, passionate, restless prober.
Craftsmanship
He was uncommonly skilled, highly trained as a craftsman and housepainter and deeply educated as a fine-art painter, with enormous control over his tools and materials. He even knew how to paint faux effects - wood and marble, in particular.
There was nothing he could not do with the brush and the paint. He understood the action of paint on the surface and how to lay it on in all those different ways - thickness, brushwork, scraping the paint down to the plaster and beginning again.
With his great admiration for all craftsmanship, he once employed a carpenter who loved making little wooden compartments with collar studs. De Kooning did not wear collar studs and never did.
Why these drawers, and all the collar studs? I asked. "Look how beautiful they're made," he said. "That's what he's good at."
Long Journeys
He never used acrylics. Even oils dried too fast for him to keep working the transformations and destructions and changes which were so much a part of his approach - the scraping, the laying-on, the building-up, the tearing-down.
Acrylics don't offer the drag, the resistance he needed in the slag of the oil.
De Kooning did not like shortcuts. He insisted on taking the long way around. His epic-making "Woman," the first major painting of the Woman series of 1950, took two years to paint.
Not that he was slow. As a matter of fact, he worked rapidly and obsessively. But each painting was a long journey, made up of stops and starts, turnings-around and going back to beginnings.
The paintings give a feeling of images lost, lurking ghosts of the one that remains in the canvas.
No Pretense
De Kooning's basic attitude was that of a workingman doing the physical job with all the skill at his command, no pretense, trying to do it better than he knew how.
His manner was somewhere between blue-collar tough and country boy, reinforced by his straight-from-the-shoulder talk and heart-of-the-matter wit.
He wore housepainter's white overalls. The land he bought to build his studio on was in a working-class neighborhood, although by the time he bought it in the '60s, he could have afforded the other side of the tracks.
The environment of high art and avant-gardism is one Jackson Pollock avoided and Willem de Kooning escaped.
How Many Ways?
I asked him on the occasion of my 1984 visit, "How does it feel to be rich and famous?" His paintings were selling at auction for millions.
He said, "Vell, it's nice to know I can make a living."
I said, "What about being famous? How does it feel to be so famous?"
He said, "Vell, you know, it doesn't come into my head."
The painting, as fresh daily impulse, as an exercise of the mind and spirit, as an invocation to God, if you will, was what it was about. Starting a fresh canvas meant reopening, reinvoking the problem - impossible to solve, possible only to begin.
How many ways to begin, how many ways to keep going? This is what obsessed de Kooning. Fame was as far from his comprehension of reality as the Man in the Moon.
At Wolfie's
The East End artists, particularly the young ones who live and work around Springs, whose hero he is, could be found on the day of the funeral not at the big studio reception - since they did not really know him personally and were too shy to crash, as too many others did - but at Wolfie's bar on Fort Pond Boulevard.
They were drinking to him there in celebration of his life and in the ambition to keep alive the tradition of Western painting as experienced through and by de Kooning, the very quintessence of that history.
That little group of young painters, some of whom deliberately live in the area made sacred by Pollock and de Kooning, knows it is a threatened species. Some even work as house painters, prompted by de Kooning's example. And that's how it is.
What Of The Studio?
What are the plans for the de Kooning studio, surely a monument to the artist, with its brushes, pigments, and books still neatly laid out, as it was his habit to do in preparation for the next day?
(He was, in my observation, one of the neatest and most orderly of all artists in his working habits, just as a good workingman should be, giving full respect to his tools and materials.)
There is talk of making the studio an East Hampton landmark, similar to the Krasner-Pollock House and Studio. There is also talk of an artists' residence program with fellowships for young artists to live and work there free from worldly intrusions, similar to programs like Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and, closer to home, the Edward Albee Foundation in Montauk.
I will continue to think about Bill de Kooning. Thinking about him and his work always brings freshness to the mind. Here on the East End we were so lucky to have him in our midst, and now to know that his ashes are in the wind.