|
‘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
|
