De Kooning, Willem 1904-

DE KOONING, WILLEM 1904-

Abstract expressionist artist

Recognition

In 1954 when the Museum of Modern Art mounted the exhibit for the American Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the most prestigious world display of contemporary art, only two artists were included: Ben Shahn, a proletarian painter and poster-art innovator, and Willem de Kooning. It was the second of three times during the 1950s that de Kooning's works had been included in the Venice Biennale, and it was a recognition of his preeminent place among contemporary American artists. In New York his works were included in the Whitney Museum Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting every year during the decade except for 1955, 1957, and 1958; his works were at the center of the influential Young American Painters exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum; and his three one-man shows at the Sidney Janis Gallery in Manhattan were among the most influential of the decade. No living American artist commanded more critical attention than de Kooning—not even his competitive friend Jackson Pollock.

Apprenticeship

De Kooning was born in Holland and studied at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques before moving to New York in 1926. He was a housepainter briefly before moving to Greenwich Village in New York, where he took a job as a commercial artist to support himself while he attempted more serious work on his own time. He joined the Federal Arts Project in 1935 and decided soon thereafter to abandon his work designing window displays for shoe stores and painting public murals to concentrate on a new kind of art called abstract expressionism (see entry). By 1950 he was the acknowledged master of this controversial art form, producing paintings that in the words of a Time reviewer "look like scribbles any kid could do" and selling them to museums and private collectors for several thousand dollars per scribbled-upon canvas.

Woman

In 1950 de Kooning began a work he called Woman I. Over a two-year period he painted daily and washed away images on the same canvas, never able to satisfy his vision. Then in June 1952 he finished his work and for the remainder of the year produced a series of increasingly grotesque and decreasingly recognizable paintings of women that was exhibited with great fanfare in March 1953 at the Sidney Janis Gallery. Critic Harry Gaugh referred to the works as a "coven of sympathetic witches."

Critics

The art world was divided in its response to de Kooning's new works. He was praised by the more conservative critics, who were struggling for a vocabulary to discuss abstract expressionism and were thankful to be able to discern a vaguely recognizable image in his works. More-devoted adherents of abstract expressionism criticized de Kooning for a lack of commitment to abstraction. Robert Coates in the New Yorker noted that de Kooning fails in his Woman series of paintings to "commit himself to either their representational or their abstract possibilities but hesitates constantly between the two, and the result is a splashy and confused muddle of pigment that obscures as much as it reveals of the subject."

Freedom of Abstraction

Two years before, in a lecture at the Museum of Modern Art, De Kooning had answered those who criticized his paintings for their references to recognizable objects. He observed that when the abstractionists of the turn of the century came to prominence they brought with them a theory of what art should be that had negative qualities—it dictated what could not be included in art: "The question, as they saw it, was not so much what you could paint but rather what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that subject matter came into existence as something you ought not to have."

Landscapes

After his Woman series de Kooning turned to trees and mountains as his subjects in a series of abstract landscapes, beginning with a 1955 painting called Woman as Landscape. That year Hurricane Diane hit the East Coast, causing 184 deaths and a record amount of damage, and de Kooning appropriated the event as a metaphor for his art. His transition paintings had a chaotic appearance, and they marked his movement by the end of the decade into pure abstraction.

Reputation

Among his contemporaries de Kooning was admired for his honesty, intensity, and dedication to his art. He established himself as a spokesman for and representative of the abstract-expressionist values, and he became so powerful a personage that he was accused by the end of the decade of dominating the profession and thus stifling the creativity of younger artists. Influential art critic Clement Greenberg attacked de Kooning for his respect of traditional values and for the lack of spontaneity in his paintings. De Kooning's response was that he had to think about his paintings, and it took intense concentration and often several attempts to achieve the effect he sought. His integrity won out. As Stevan Naifeh and Gregory White Smith point out in their biography of de Kooning's friend Pollock, "No artist was more respected or better liked … [de Kooning] was the embodiment of culture."

Sources:

Robert Coates, "The Art Galleries," New Yorker (4 April 1953): 94-96;

Harry F. Gaugh, De Kooning (New York: Abbeville Press, 1983);

Irving Sandier, The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties (New York: Icon / Harper & Row, 1978).