lacuna [park]

De Kooning by Andrew Forge

The following is one of my favorite articles on De Kooning by Andrew Forge. I wish I had known about Andrew Forge (1923–2002) when he was alive I’ve become a huge admirer of his writings and of his art

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De Kooning’s mess is salutary. He is in eternal opposition to all prescriptive views of painting, and whatever he has done, good or bad, is a witness to the fact that content in painting is somehow related to an art that refuses to draw boundaries round itself.

He paints in the first person; he is within his work, surrounded by it, and although his position is as reflective and as humorous as any painter’s, there is no mocking of what he is doing, no ironic reservation.

‘Actually’, he said of Renaissance painting in an article published in 1951, ‘there was no subject-matter. What we call subject-matter now, was then painting itself.’ It is an idea that can be applied directly to his own painting. He covers a vast range of material, from match boxes to empty oceans, from numerals to brassières, from pastoral landscapes and lovers to city streets and old newspapers. And this is paralleled by a gamut of language which runs between the most precise illusionism and allusions which are so tenuous as to be almost invisible within the paint that supports them. But wherever one picks up the thread one is aware that to split off one attribute of his painting at the expense of another is to miss what the picture is about.

The figures in his pictures are active presences which appear to be living by their own energy. They are not lay-figures, propped up in limbo, nor posing models. Neither are they masterful personifications, nor the butts of expressionist passion. They seem to have unlimited independence, and yet to be close upon us, to exist at the picture’s brink.

Up to about 1942 his figures are almost exclusively men; after that they are women. As a matter of fact, the division now appears to be sharper than one had supposed because Thomas B. Hess has revised some of the dates in his present catalogue, putting the first group of women into the years 1943–6, whereas in his book on de Kooning published nearly a decade ago he had made them overlap by three years with the male subjects.

The men stand or sit, singly or in pairs, in dim rooms. Usually there is a single object at their side, a vase, or a picture on the wall, nothing else. They wear overalls, working shirts or the kind of long coats that storemen wear, and the folds and creases in the clothes are treated with peculiar emphasis, a clear-cut classical attention that seems to lift the garments outside the blunt, mundane circumstance of the pose. This localised intensity recurs in the features where, although the faces seem often to be hardly there at all, so tentatively are they painted, the eyes are forced in tone, highly defined. This gives them an intent, concentrated look quite unlike the moody gaze of the figures in Blue Period Picasso with which they invite comparison.

Hess records that de Kooning did in fact use a lay-figure at this time, dressed in overalls; but it is easier to see these figures as self-portraits. They have that dry look, and the poses, particularly in the important Seated man of 1939 and The glazier of 1940 suggest an artist working with two mirrors. Drawings relating to these pictures are obviously of the artist.

‘I used to get so involved in drawing elusive things like noses,’ he told an interviewer. ‘Imagine how the shadow falls on the fleshy part of the nose, and how are you going to render it with a hard pencil? These are the drawing problems that can drive you nuts, that you have to give up.’

The women are members of a different race. They enter with fanfares. To date there are four main groups: the ones that look like Bette Davis of 1943–6, the ones that look like wolves in grandmother’s clothing of 1950–5, the fragmented series on paper of 1961 and the girls like laughing cow-pats which have occupied him since 1964. The anxious containment of the early interiors is dispersed once and for all by them. Where almost all the men give the impression of having been at some stage worked from observation, the women do not. It is as though their jostling presence, regal, shrill and bedecked, puts an end to contemplation and stillness. The need is not so much to coax something on to the canvas as to keep abreast there with their chattering ebullience.

What kind of women are they? Hess and de Kooning himself have made a good deal of their archaic origins, but this seems to be true only in a psychological sense, not a stylistic one. They are very real, very modern. Some are mere presences, grinning wolf-like from the matted surface of the canvas, others are fully characterised with consistent detail like the great seven-foot Woman with bicycle of 1953 who is of a piece from her vast looming bust to her slender well-preserved ankles. They are all sexually aggressive. What varies is the spirit with which they threaten. Some seem all gathered up into their breasts, like strutting birds, furies, the breasts swollen to absorb the whole torso. Others, less formidable, seem caught in positions of ludicrous embarrassment, knock-kneed in nothing but their knickers, side by side like children. But it is not really they who are embarrassed. A room full of the most recent figures can induce real genital panic. At the same time, these are the most jolly, like those formidable and wonderful girls who laugh off the shaming aspects of sex and make everything all right.

Somebody once told me of how at the height of an impossible love affair he had seen the Massacre at Chios in the Louvre and how for days he had haunted it; it had been the only way he could find to assuage his unhappiness, a place to put it all. I can imagine a hag-ridden man regaining his wits in front of de Kooning’s hilarious troupers.

The furore that greeted the ‘Women’ at the time of the 1953 exhibition seems extraordinary at this distance. The issue of whether he was an abstract or a figurative painter seems quite stupid. Everything that he has ever painted can be seen ‘as’ something, can be read. And in any case, only about four years lay between that batch of women at the ones that preceded them. One reason for the uproar was probably that during those years he had become some sort of chef d’ecole and was the victim of other people’s expectations. Now, with hindsight, one sees only the continuity and consistency of his figures.

The Glazier of 1940 has all the ingredients of the later work, yet bound together into a thin, fragile surface as if by an effort of extreme will. In particular what draws one’s attention is the precarious and problematic way with which the figure is related to its surroundings. Parts of the figure are painted quite flatly, the dun green-grey of the wall seeming to invade or flow into it. Elsewhere certain features – the trousers, the nose – are split off from the surface, raised from it by sharp modelling. A decanter or flask at his side is a negative shape in fact, made out of rubbed-down mottled paint belonging to an earlier stage of the picture, is profile drawn by the flat green of the background. This practice, which he would have known all about from his sign-painting days, is one that he has exploited ever since.

With the seated women of 1943–4 the battle of figure and field takes place in a freer context and parts of the figures get loosened from the main forms and find new articulations and new scales. These pictures owe a great deal to the seated figures of Matisse and of Picasso – they are ecole de Paris pictures. An idiom which in the hands of thousands of painters all over the world was simply the formula for faceless, subjectless painting is here the generator of unique images. With Pink lady of 1944 the corrections and adjustments which accompany the drawing are left uncancelled and are progressively built up into the final image. At first glance the multiple view point of the head, the neck and the arms seems to place it closer to Picasso than any. But this is not confirmed when one tries to work out how it got like that. Hess says somewhere that de Kooning’s motto could have been an inversion of Picasso’s famous remark, i.e. ‘I do not find, I search,’ and in no other picture is the thought more to the point. The pink flesh, the apple green dress, the yellow ground are like three shifting substances in constant movement against each other. Their flow, accented at points of maximum tension by thin black lines, carves out bays, inlets, promontories, and leaves, like sandbanks and ox-bow lakes, lively remnants of earlier states. The image of the woman is like some underlying geological fact which determines, after all, the limits of aggregation or erosion. What is particularly important in view of what happens later is the way in which old markings, split off from their original anchorage, are allowed a floating life of their own. There is a row of nipples like buttons; a previous definition of the neck line is now a capital L, a pair of blue callipers separates the head from the supporting hand. During the next few years in works like Pink angels and The marshes, figures are suddenly all over the place, swooping, elegant, linear shapes whose anatomy grows out of the drawing of parts, transformed in scale and relationship.

These and the works following, the black-and-whites like Light in August and the great all-over pictures of 1949–50, Ashville, Attic, Excavation, are presumably what his reputation as an abstract painter was based upon. Whatever the pictures looked like then, they certainly do not now look like pictures which are not ‘of’ anything. They teem with images, and their spaces more often than not work consistently out of overlapping shapes. Things in them have many lives and many scales. One chooses how one looks and how one takes them up. A drawing for Attic is plainly based on furniture stored under dust sheets. It is still legible as such in the large painting; it is also a conglomeration of figures, torsos, breasts, nipples, limbs. Fishes swim through it. Mouths open and shut, teeth grin.

When he returned to the single figures, ‘It did one thing for me,’ he told David Sylvester. ‘It eliminated composition, arrangement, relationships, light – all this silly talk about line, colour and form. … I put it in the centre of the canvas because there was no reason to put it a bit on the side.’

The underlying ‘geological’ fact of the frontal image had now to stand up to a far fiercer battering than before. In a sense there is a reversal of the process that made Pink lady. Instead of the picture generating itself out of the battle for the feature, now the feature seems to be generated out of the battle for the picture. The arms in Woman I are almost interchangeable with the arms of the chair hacked out of the viridian background; her breasts, like trodden balloons, are only lightly anchored and could be exchanged with the window or with the space between her feet. Hence perhaps the energy of her wolfish glare: only by such ferocity does she hold her own.

The genesis of Woman I is illustrated in Hess with six photographs taken at various stages in the painting. It is an extraordinary story. At first the figure is set quite clearly into a room- or porch-like space (we do not know whether she is indoors or out) and behind her is a wall and a fully described window. The figure appears to be stretching herself in a wide-winged arm chair. She is far more violently fragmented than her environment, thrown together out of an assortment of jagged triangles, bows, loops which might have been picked up off the floor of Attic. These are smashed into the centre of the picture; it is the head with its glaring eyes and lopsided, illustrator’s mouth that triggers the reading of the parts of the figure. The figure is very much within the picture, set back by long trailing diagonals, and with a marked change of scale between it and the surroundings. As the picture advances, going through storms of destruction and revision that one can only guess at, the figure is invaded by and in turn invades the wall behind. It is during the course of this process that his handling changes its character and becomes more ample, less a matter of ‘drawing’ and ‘painting’ but of a vigorous, inclusive gesturing, until in the end each accent, each shape can be interpreted directly as a movement of arm or wrist in paint. The shapes that bound the right breast, for instance, are transparently related to a particular looping movement and the line crossing the top of the two breasts is from a fast whip-cracking change of direction; the herring-shaped fingers are also there-and-back strokes, and so on. All this is carried out at the full scale of the canvas, so that in the end everything you see is both image and the painter at work, on this canvas, at this distance. The earlier multiple references and choices are still available, but they are now underwritten by the dominating physical fact of the paint-covered canvas ploughed and harrowed by a man’s arm.

The works that occupied him between 1955 and 57, pictures like Gotham news, Easter Monday, The time of the fire, represent his painting at its highest point of energy. They have lost none of their original fire or mystery. They stand in the same relation to the Women of ‘50-‘55 as Attic and Excavation stand to Pink lady. They too exploit the campaigns won over the figure in wider, more diffused terrain. Only now the fragmented imagery of beaks and mouths and flying letters has given way to something more realistic, more sober. These are street scenes, crowded urban landscapes, and as one explores their white towering blocks – newspapers, walls – or fiery openings – red traffic, windows, lights – one is aware that it is paint structure itself that challenges one’s fantasies, something as immediate and material as the fabric of the places that the pictures evoke.

This correspondence between the physical fabric of the picture and the imagined world that constructs itself around it becomes more and more critical towards the end of the 1950s when he starts on the larger, more loosely painted landscapes, such as Parc Rosenberg and Suburb in Havana. Here the landscape sensations are very literal; they are also very unstable, for as one presses the picture more closely they have a trick of returning to nothing but paint. They are constructed out or much larger, more daring strokes than before. The standard canvas size is 80 inches by 70. (‘Notice … how 70 inches, given a landscape sensation, exactly fits the arms-spread gesture of a man,’ Hess wrote in the catalogue of the 1962 exhibition.) it was these reckless and flattering pictures that seduced half the painters in the world, or so it seemed about eight years ago. Here, wielding a two-inch brush at full stretch of his arm, the painter was really on his athletic mettle. The whole ethos of spontaneity, the picture-as-the-act was on test and only a painter of de Kooning’s courage and Protean virtuosity could have sustained it for so long.

Action Painting in the literal sense that is given by these pictures, is a red herring. Suburb in Havana looks as meretricious as any painting which exploits illusionistic devices too literally. De Kooning’s doubts and adventures are too near the surface. There is an element of fighting talk: how can we (or he) believe simultaneously in the soul-searching question posed by the improvisatory method and in the cashing conclusions of these gut-bucket strokes? The kind of spaces that are hacked out here with massive repoussoirs, crossings and spatters are literal and without resonance; the initial excitement of tearing into the painting, as if down a curtained corridor, has a short life. I see these pictures like projects for unrealised stage sets, or as sculptor’s drawings, that is to say, as provisional. They are the opposite from that search for the definitive and the unique which was Action Painting’s central claim: they need not be how they are – they could be otherwise.

The recent figures, it seems to me, are far from being the relaxed repetitions that some have seen them as. He has withdrawn from the fruitless exposure of Action Painting. They are tougher in a way, although at first sight their trembling bagginess would suggest the opposite. They reintroduce the kind of drawing that finds an edge between an imagined form and its field; that is to say, space is transformed in them and is not tied simply to the exigencies of paint. Lovers melt into the grass. A woman bathes alone, and if she is both moving and horrifying, squatting and snapping with her spread legs, this inclusive ambiguity of mood is faithful to the dishevelled and generous tradition that he has established over forty years.

All along he has alternated between batches of figures when his attention is focused on a central image that returns his glance, and dispersed paintings – landscapes, interiors, ‘abstracts’ – where there is no focal grimace. Either mode has supported his preoccupation with the mystery of figure and field, the question ‘what is it?’ And either has supported in widely differing ways his drive towards self-revelation, expressed earlier in the introspective melancholy of the male subjects, later in the fantasies of the late ‘40s and in the athletic extensions of Action Painting. Throughout, the women have provided something essential. Who knows what knot was broken when they first made their appearance? Something happened then, some prohibition was lifted and an energy was released, both joyful and violent, which could absorb wider and wider swathes of the outside world. The women are both condensed and rigid anatomies, and spread-out, embracing landscapes. Sometimes it is a matter of dominance; they appropriate everything. Sometimes it is a matter of how much they can take and still come up laughing. Either way, it seems they hold a key to the renewal of his search.

Andrew Forge

1968, Volume 176, No 906, p246

http://www.studio-international.co.uk/archive/dekooning_1968_176_906.asp