The exhibition of paintings by Willem de Kooning at the National Gallery of Art here is technically not a retro-
spective. It’s much smaller than such surveys of a life’s work usually are, and it doesn’t include any sculpture or drawings.
Yet it’s impossible to avoid approaching this collection of 76 paintings in a retrospective mood. De Kooning, who turned 90 on April 24, stopped working about eight years ago because of memory loss. One tends to think of him in the past tense.
The exhibit, organized by the National Gallery in cooperation with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Tate Gallery in London, represents the best that De Kooning has achieved as a painter. Unless canvases from the late ’80s surface after his death, the evidence of his career is complete.
De Kooning’s art has been so well known for so long that there aren’t any secrets in it left to discover. Rather, the show invites the viewer to evaluate, in a historical sense, one of the most productive and distinguished careers in 20th Century art.
Does De Kooning deserve his reputation as the greatest living American painter? Do the celebrated black-and-white abstractions of the late 1940s and the grotesque “Women” of the early ’50s represent the peak of his creativity? Are the paintings of his last 10 years a burst of inspiration or a mannered reworking of the past?
First, his stature. It’s silly to rate artists as if they were prizefighters. De Kooning is a painter of considerable accomplishment, the last heroic painter of this century. Few artists have dedicated themselves so totally to the creative act as he has. He will always be a primary figure in modern art.
As to his peak years, De Kooning was most inventive when he was responding to cubism, as he was through the mid-1950s. When he moved to eastern Long Island in 1963 and began to paint landscapes, he became less convincing. Returning to the figure a few years later, he rejuvenated himself.
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As to the third question, the lyrical paintings of the 1980s, when viewed in the context of a full career, seem decidedly stronger and more original than they generally have been considered to be.
I am moved to make these judgments by the straightforward manner in which the paintings are presented. The exhibition, which runs through Sept. 5, is organized chronologically by principal themes, with minimal didactic labeling. It declines to involve itself with De Kooning’s turbulent life, which would be a distraction.
The recent speculation over his mental deterioration and the way his estate is being managed by his daughter and her lawyer drop away. The viewer is left with the 76 paintings, which reveal a remarkably consistent and obsessive approach to picture-making.
De Kooning has been the center of attention and controversy since his first solo exhibition in New York in 1948, when he raised critical eyebrows with the black-and-white abstractions. The National Gallery exhibition re-creates the spirit of that landmark show at the Charles Egan Gallery by devoting a room to seven of these pictures.
As soon as he was recognized (at 44) as a major talent, De Kooning was promoted by some artists and critics as the king of abstract expressionism, a title also claimed for Jackson Pollock by his partisans. Pollock’s death in 1956 ended the rivalry in De Kooning’s favor, and he has been considered the greatest living American painter ever since.
De Kooning delighted his fans in 1950 when he produced the large white abstraction called “Excavation” for the Venice Biennale. The last De Kooning retrospective, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1983-84, lacked this masterpiece, but it’s included here.
Then, in 1953, he shocked everyone by exhibiting the ferocious-looking “Woman I” and five others of its ilk at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. By representing a human figure, De Kooning appeared to be turning his back on from-the-gut abstraction; some artists denounced him as a traitor to the abstract expressionist movement.
Yet as British scholar David Sylvester points out in his catalog essay, abstract expressionism was never a disciplined movement but was more like a confederation of artists pursuing similar philosophical goals. It always accommodated a variety of styles, some of them not particularly expressionist.
After the agitated figures came the landscapes of the late 1950s and early ’60s, produced with broad, straight swashes of pigment rather than nervous, angular jabs. His palette became mellower, restricted to colors one is likely to find in nature such as blue and ochre. As forceful as they are, though, the landscapes of the 1960s seem too opaque and heavy to evoke such sublime sensations as “Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point.”
By 1963, the female figure had returned, this time in a more sensual incarnation. The two female nudes he called “Clam Diggers” are as coy and flirtatious as vintage Fragonard. Yet often his later figures are so abstracted that they present themselves as broad suggestions or as fragments.
In 1973 and ’74, De Kooning focused on bronze sculptures that were three-dimensional interpretations of the figures he had recently been painting. Then in 1975, he began what turned out to be the final phase of his career by painting a series of landscapes and seascapes.
These became progressively more reductive until, by the 1980s, his images were more graphic than painterly. The late paintings are compositions of line and washy passages of color on white grounds, achieved by scraping down his characteristic impasto. The late paintings are quieter and far more poetic than anything he had ever done.
But these late paintings, eight of which are included in this exhibition, generated one final controversy. Some critics wondered whether De Kooning might have been unduly helped along by his studio assistants. In 1989, he was judged incompetent to handle his affairs. His daughter, Lisa, and her lawyer, John L. Eastman, were appointed conservators of his property.
De Kooning was academically trained in his native Holland, and he began as a figure painter. The exhibition establishes this fact with a series of figures that move progressively toward a Picasso-like entropy, reaching an extreme in “Pink Lady.”
The black-and-white abstractions, which follow, represent a sustained tour de force of image fragmentation and recombination, of point and counterpoint created by line and shape. De Kooning achieved the apotheosis of this tactic in “Excavation,” which may be his greatest painting.
The subject of an abstract expressionist painting was supposed to be the act of making the painting. With his “Women,” De Kooning made it clear that he rejected that idea. He always had a subject, even if it wasn’t always recognizable.
Actually, he had two subjects, the figure and the landscape, which he occasionally combined.
It seems remarkable now to recognize his tunnel vision and to realize how committed he was to the continual search for unattainable perfection.
He was an obsessive tinkerer who continually scraped down and reworked his canvases. As much as he painted, he repainted, and he once conceded that he had trouble deciding when a painting was finished.
De Kooning’s final creative surge is marked here by a gallery devoted to six paintings made in 1977 and one in 1978. These abstractions are fleshier than his early work; the paint is creamier and drippier and the marks more fluid.
De Kooning liked to be able to rework wet paint, and consequently he developed his own paint formulas that dried very slowly.
The exhibition closes with the primary-color paintings from the ’80s. These bright, airy images achieve an unexpected clarity of vision that puts into perspective everything that came before. They constitute an elegiac and appropriate stopping point.
When the next De Kooning retrospective comes along, it won’t be able to say much more than this exhibition does. Seventy-six paintings might not be enough to cover Picasso or Matisse but for De Kooning, it’s adequate and satisfying.
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“Willem de Kooning: Paintings” continues at the National Gallery of Art, Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue N.W., through Sept. 5. For information, call 202-737-4215 (recording) or 202-842-6353.