Art: Softer De Koonings

De Koonings

New settings, new subjects

Fifteen years have passed since Willem de Kooning, one of the last patriarchs of abstract expressionism, moved out of Manhattan to live and work near East Hampton, among the flat green potato fields and salty inlets of Long Island. This span of time was for him, in the jargon of art history, a “period.” His manner of painting changed, becoming looser, splashier, more atmospheric than it had ever been before. The drawing loosened too, and the place supplied him with a different subject matter—a landscape of dunes and water reflections, green groves and pink bodies half eroded by light, full of softness and coarse sexual ebullience. The aim of the new show at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum, “Willem de Kooning in East Hampton,” is to sum up this work. It does, with nearly 100 paintings, drawings and sculptures, ranging from 1962 to 1977, and an excellent catalogue by Curator of Exhibitions Diane Waldman.

The difficulty is to reconcile what one sees at the Guggenheim with the thunderous claims made for de Kooning’s late work. A good example of the critical genre appeared in New York, by de Kooning’s longstanding friend, exegete and collector, Thomas Hess. “It was in such storms,” writes Hess, presumably referring to the squidgy, roiled surface of the paintings, “that life first was created, and creativity —the miracle of genesis—is the ultimate concern in de Kooning’s difficult, elusive, spontaneous art.” The drift of Hess’s passage seems to be that de Kooning, at 73, is much more than a tempest: he is either God or, at the very least, a primal cloud of cosmic gas. There have not been tropes like this since the old days at Art News.

De Kooning’s seriousness as an artist and his historical achievement are of very considerable magnitude, and will always invite judgment by the highest standards of modernism. But the work of his old age is not remotely of the same order as the late works of other old men of the modernist mountain—Matisse at 80 with his colored cutouts, the last paintings of Cézanne, Monet’s lily ponds. That sense of exaltation, of a long life resolved and its aesthetic structures made luminously explicit, is missing. Instead, we get a lot of dash and gusto, a polymorphous, ill-focused energy. It is enjoyable, and even tonic. But these are not likely to be the paintings that fix de Kooning’s place in history.

The problem is that this exhuberance belies the great merit of de Kooning’s earlier work, its structure. As Waldman suggests in her catalogue essay, his paintings have moved from expressionism to a kind of abstract, though physically intrusive, impressionism. De Kooning’s East Hampton subjects are classic impressionist ones—the nude in the landscape, the jostle of marine reflections, the movement and flicker of small painterly units that correspond to the “feel” of light and wind.

There is, of course, no question of working outdoors; each painting is a node of memory, a jumble of sense impressions recorded after the event in the studio and run through de Kooning’s habitual signs. Some of his nudes, glimpsed on the beach, have lost the fearsome and iconic look of his famous series of Women; they are rose colored, billowy and amiable. The colors are of astounding brilliance. There can be few colorists alive today who can project, with a few judicious swipes, the same sense of wellbeing. Yet there are plenty of moments when the torrent of hot, sweet pigment — the raspberries, icy blues, or anges and minty greens — clogs the eye.

De Kooning’s reluctance to define a form or fully articulate a set of shapes does tell against his paintings. The swift, hooking line of his earlier work — that consummate rendition of energy by one of the master draftsmen ever to live in the U.S. — has softened to a re markable degree. One feels the removal of de Kooning’s cubist under props, and it is a loss; the surface that remains is too gooey to sustain the flailing energies of brushwork and brusque disjunctures of color that de Kooning loads on it. Time and again, one is brought up short by a reflection that never occurs in the presence of his work from the ’40s and ’50s: that these paintings do not al ways prove their necessity, and their joie de vivre comes close to rodomontade. But his defects are still those of a major artist, and against them must be set the fact, which every part of the show proclaims, of de Kooning’s large and affirmative ambitions. Here entropy, the normal condition of the art world today, does not reign .