The Continuing Reinvention of Willem de Kooning

Seeing the de Kooning retrospective at MoMA in 2011 was a revelation. Two hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints exploded off the walls, and the sheer range and virtuosity of his output was astounding. But there has never been, until now, a retrospective dedicated primarily to his drawings, even though drawing was the foundation for everything he made in seven decades of working… even though to understand and appreciate any of his work, you need to witness his radical approach to drawing. The Art Institute of Chicago is currently showing more than 200 of de Kooning’s drawings, and his famous statement “I draw in paint” is readily apparent in this exhibit. Works spanning from 1919 all the way through to 1985, including drawings from his Woman series, showcase an artist who pushed himself relentlessly and with fevered exuberance. (His wife, Elaine De Kooning, wrote in her comments for the 1984 Whitney retrospective that “Bill could work at a painting for months and months, all day long, ten to twelve hours a day.”)

Willem de Kooning was born in the Netherlands in 1904 and, starting at age 13, studied at the Academy of Visual Arts and Technical Sciences in Rotterdam for four years. Dish with Jugs, charcoal on woven paper, is an example of this rigorous classical training. He went on to apprentice at a design firm, where he later worked full time, and took four-hour-long drawing classes at night. The long years of study laid a strong foundation that he would use for exploring and discovering his singular voice, and The Kiss (1925), in charcoal, shows a particular facility for expression and style.

After painting signs for a department store, he stowed away on a freighter to the U.S., and soon made it to New York City. He designed window displays, did odd jobs and made murals for the WPA. (The WPA rescued many a struggling artist during the years between 1935 to 1943.) The Art Institute of Chicago is showing studies of some of these murals, which are clearly influenced by Miró, Gorky and Jean Arp. Willem married Elaine in 1943, and there are delicate graphite drawings of her, elegantly shaded with exquisite lips. During that time and into his later years, he continually painted over paintings, reworking, sanding them down and usually working charcoal into wet paint. A lot of his work involved erasure—cutting, scraping, taping, rubbing out. In the late ’30s, Elaine said that while the paint was still wet, people would often come into the studio and buy a painting and take it away.

By the mid-’40s, he was mostly painting women, building layer after layer of charcoal and oil across the surface, scraping and erasing. Of the Woman series of 1950 to 1955, he said “Art never seemed to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity.” Elaine said of this time that she “saw hundreds and hundreds of images go by. I mean, paintings that were masterpieces. I would come in at night and find they had been painted away.” The free gesture he found for the round full breasts, buttocks and bellies expressed all types of women in their complex depth. He told his assistant, Tom Ferrara, “What about women who make hats that live in Sag Harbor?” Ferrara told me that “Bill hated the glamor girl. He wanted to show their moods, their anger. His women are like Mesopotamian fertility goddesses.”

Ferrara felt that de Kooning’s mid-’50s abstracts were his best period. In the show, there are a number of these women drawings: Two Women, Three Women, Two Women’s Torsos, Study for ‘Woman VI’, Woman Seated I and II, Reclining Woman, Woman and Abstract Figure. Elaine said, “…at his easel, the possibilities he unleashed were Furies…his embattled paintings.” This is no wonder, coming out of the brutalities of World War I and II, especially in Europe when he was growing up. His early years in the U.S. during the fascist regime, Hitler, as well as the many immigrant artists coming to New York City. One of them was Gorky, who became a close friend and a big influence. The struggle to work in these emotional conditions must have been extremely difficult. Many fell into drinking, as did de Kooning, who struggled with the addiction for a long time. In 1966, he did the series of Crucifixion drawings while actively trying to quit drinking.

De Kooning was continually experimenting with mediums. Ferrara told me that as late as the mid-1970s, de Kooning was mixing oil and water. “Bill would pour water over the oil paint that he had mixed with safflower oil. This created a blubbery coating, thick and fluid. ‘Danish puddy.’ It thickens up and can be used to fill cracks in floorboards. Bill was always experimenting.” In 1979, de Kooning finally quit drinking, for the most part because he and Elaine had gotten back together. Throughout the 1980s, she made him feel safe and taken care of. Ferrara said, “At this time, Bill was trying to get free of Picasso’s influence, the cubist style. He admired Matisse and wanted that floating quality. He didn’t want the struggle or the process interfering with his work. A simpler quality, like Matisse. Elegiac.”

Displayed chronologically and expertly curated by Kevin Salatino and Anne Vogt Fuller, the show lays bare de Kooning’s evolution. The rigorous training, the many job experiences, the artistic influences, friendships and love affairs, the wars, his experimentation and use of materials, his process, it’s all there in the work. The last painting in the show is the ethereal 1985 oil on canvas with no title. Against an off-white background float a few simple black and blue lines. A fitting exit to a sensational show.

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