Abstraction anchored by the human form
By Jackie Wullschlager

FT
May 11 2005 03:00

Licence my roving hands, and let them go

Before, behind, between, above, below.

O my America, my new found land.

John Donne, Elegies

Willem de Kooning painted luscious young women who ended up looking
like terrifying harridans. “I find I can paint pretty young girls, yet
when it is finished I always find they are not there, only their
mothers,” he explained. After Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”,
de Kooning’s “Woman” series is the most famous depiction – distortion
– of the female form in 20th-century art. A group of them gather like
hags on the heath at the centre of Rotterdam’s new de Kooning show:
some singles – “Woman (Blue Eyes)”, the Hirshhorn’s 1953 yellow
“Woman”, her body sliced through with a giant suggestive red triangle
– and some in couples, such as the raspberry- and strawberry-coloured
pair in “Two Women in the Country”.

Toothy, domineering, with mask-like faces and enormously enlarged
eyes, breasts, hips, how insolently they glare back at us when we
stare at their savage full-frontal portrayals, composed of
brushstrokes that seem to slash into their flesh, deforming it even as
de Kooning creates them with the sweeping force of his abstracting,
whiplash line. “I wanted them to be funny, so I made them look satiric
and monstrous, like sibyls,” he said. You don’t need to be Freud to
suspect that, as de Kooning’s wife Elaine protested, “that ferocious
woman he painted didn’t come from living with me. It began when he was
three years old.”

De Kooning was born a century ago in the rough, colourful,
unpretentious, open-minded port city of Rotterdam, where his father
was a liquor merchant and his tough mother ran a sailors’ bar by the
docks. In 1926 he fled Holland glamorously by working his passage on a
steamer, then jumped ship to live illegally in Manhattan, where in
time he became King of Canvas, America’s most celebrated artist. This
first retrospective in his native city, however, makes immediately
clear both that his rumbustious, unsquashable, vivid quality owes a
primary debt to Rotterdam, and – seen from the rare perspective of a
showing of his work on this side of the Atlantic – that he was a
strongly European as wellas a quintessentially American painter. The
two elements coalesce: like many immigrants tracing hope and
possibility in the new world, the flying Dutchman’s template of memory
and ideals was European.

Crucially, this kept him on the tightrope between abstraction and
figuration – the tension that gives his work energy and interest and
has ensured its long, sustaining influence on contemporary
painting. You see it as soon as you enter the ample, bright Kunsthal,
where his canvases are spread generously over spacious galleries that
open up into one another, affording long vistas and comparisons of
early and late periods. Unlike his American contemporaries, de Kooning
had a rigorous Dutch training as a figure painter and this show begins
with the waif-like, ethereal, depression-era portraits from the early
1940s, such as “The Glazier” and “The Acrobat”, in subdued brown and
blue tones. They announce a debt to Picasso and to Arshile Gorky –
Gorky’s melancholy “The Artist and His Mother”, painted from a
photograph after her death in the Armenian genocide, is the most
striking model – that lasted all de Kooning’s life.

Monochrome works, abstractions indebted to cubism, followed: the
tautly structured, dancing forms in “Zot” (1949), painted with subtle
gradations of thick and thin paint, and an exquisite harmony between
black and white, neither dominating the other, is a fine example here,
lent by the Metropolitan Museum. But only when de Kooning fleshed out
cubism’s bare bones with the sensuous layering of lush paint in the
1950s “Woman” series did he find his own truly authentic style.

Veering towards abstraction, the “Woman” series transforms the figure
while retaining classical elements within a vortex of paint – paint
that is sexy and physical, built up like a material substance,
transfiguring and fleshy at the same time. “I get the paint right on
the surface. Nobody else can do that,”de Kooning boasted, but his
women caused uproar in avant-garde New York, where abstract
expressionism was the house style of the free world and to draw the
human figure seemed an act of political betrayal. De Kooning was
laconic: it was as ridiculous not to paint the human figure as to
paint it, he observed. Later he added that to use flesh tones was as
daring as it had once been topaint a body blue or red. In this
context, two works from the 1960s, the Metropolitan Museum’s “Woman”
and another New York loan, “Woman on a Sign”,radiant with candy-pink
and sweet cream splashed in the merest suggestion of bodies across
colour-saturated canvases, are masterpieces, and de Kooning’s “flesh
was the reason why oil painting was invented” as good a summing-up of
the erotic impulse of art as any.

Fifty years on, de Kooning’s harpies sit squarely in the continuum of
modernism. He said as much himself: “I began with Woman because it’s
like a tradition, like Venus, like the Olympia, like Manet made
Olympia.” His women inherit the bold look and aggressive posture of
both Olympia and the ladies of Avignon (“Picasso is the guy to beat”);
their other European debts are to the majestic gleaming bodies of his
Netherlandish ancestor Rubens, and to the tortured expressiveness of
Chaim Soutine, painter of bloody animal carcasses. They are not really
innovative works at all, but classics of adaptation and assimilation:
a crazy, high-voltage mixture of primitive goddess, Marilyn Monroe,
comic cartoon and 1950s suburban American frump.

It is impossible, as you move from these creatures to the rapturous
landscapes and figures in landscapes not to see de Kooning’s
freewheeling gestural marks and gorgeously liberated colour in clichéd
terms as a response to the space and sense of possibility in
mid-century America. Highlights include “Man Accabonac” (1971), one of
many pieces here from private collections worldwide, the Stedelijk’s
lovely cool-hued seascape “North Atlantic Light” (1976), with its
sketchy sailing boat serene amid chaotic waves of peach, crimson,
brilliant deep blue and yellow, and the Whitney Museum’s “Door to the
River” (1960), evocative of the eternal flow of river and road, of
people arriving and leaving. “Detour” (1958) is an abstract, melting,
yellow-green road map of America’s endless highways that makes me
think not only of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, but also of another
1950s classic, by the Russian émigré Vladimir Nabokov. In Lolita,
Humbert Humbert and his charge race from motel to motel on a journey
of sex and death that is also the co-opting of innocent, free America
into decadent, history-laden European art.

At the start of his mad-dash exploration of US motorways, the European
Humbert awakens gradually to “the odd sense of living in a brand new,
mad new dream world, where everything was permissible”, and so it was
with de Kooning. This show ends with the skeletal, pared-down untitled
abstractions of the mid-1980s; their emptiness suggests the dementia
that was to overtake de Kooning in his last decade, the fading forms
images of forgetting, but the swirling still-powerful lines and
biomorphic shapes return also to Gorky, de Kooning’s first mentor, and
something of that mid-century spirit of freedom remains. It allowed de
Kooning, as Barnett Newman said of all the abstract expressionists,
“to start from scratch, to paint as if painting never existed
before”. Yet, unhampered by the puritanism that colours so much
American art, de Kooning was also able to achieve resonance and a
tragic-comic depth by celebrating his European sources. Those myriad
forces animate every canvas in this convincing retrospective, which,
though lacking certain iconic works – “Woman 1”, “Excavation”, “Gotham
News” – makes an immensely satisfying centenary homecoming.

Willem de Kooning, Kunsthal, Rotterdam, to July 3. Tel +31 10 44 00 301