THE ANTIMASTER NOW

LAST OF THE ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST TITANS, WILLEM DE KOONING CONTINUES TO WORK AGAINST THE GRAIN OF HIS OWN AWESOME MASTERY

Willem de Kooning lives more or less alone, as he has for over a decade, in his big, self-designed studio and house in the Springs, a small community at the far end of Long Island. His solitude is qualified by the frequent presence of several women, most notably his wife Elaine and his friend Joan Ward, both of whom live nearby, as well as his daughter with Ward, Lisa, for whom he maintains a house on the property. But his socializing is minimal these days. At the age of seventy-nine, he has outlived nearly all his contemporaries in the heroic first generation of abstract expressionism. His memory is failing. He rises early and works all day on large abstract paintings; in the evenings, he draws.

These new paintings go on the market for up to $350,000 apiece, a sum that seems to mean little to De Kooning. Since arriving in America as a stowaway in 1926, he has never driven a car, has seldom traveled, and his only extravagance has been his present studio. He has lived a life in which the one stable focus has been work and more work. "Why do I keep doing this stuff?" he once said to me, gesturing almost disgustedly at a half-dozen pictures in progress. "I don't need the money!"

De Kooning in person is—if such a thing is possible—charismatically shy. He is a small man with amazing blue eyes. The wizening of his once powerful body has made him seem oddly younger, more a little Dutch boy— sweet, a bit sly, and very bright. The improbable fifty-eight-year survival of the occasional pidgin grammar and the luxuriant accent bespeaks a selfprotective mask. "I don't remember so good no more, d'ya mind?!" he chirped when I visited to interview him some years ago. (I said I didn't mind, and he said, "Neither do I! Let's talk!") His phrasings stick in the mind like popular tunes.

Each of the several times I have seen him, he has struck me immediately, and breathtakingly, as one of the loneliest people I've ever met. From behind a courtly charm, he radiates a bottomless restlessness, as if some voice in his head were repeating, against every proposal from the world and himself, "not that" and "not that" and "not that."

I have an image of him, completely unverified: unable to sleep in the predawn hours, roaming alone in his cavernous studio, a small figure of concentrated, utter dissatisfaction. Maybe there is a wind from the Atlantic, or maybe silence—whichever seems more forlorn. The point of the fantasy is to scare myself with a dark counterpoint to that other, widely shared, triumphant image: Willem de Kooning as the best painter in the history of American art.

I can't imagine many viewers of De Kooning's current retrospective at the Whitney confidently arguing with that image. Since the 1930s—when the idea of major art, like De Kooning himself, was an unnaturalized alien on these shores—no other American has so consistently and variously deployed such extraordinary skills. He is the closest thing we have to an oldfashioned master, the genius who raps the world to attention with his gentlest touch. But what does it signify to be "the best" in a realm as problematical, as fraught with contingency and contradiction, as contemporary art?

We have the authority of De Kooning's work and thorny sensibility to back us in asking such questions. He is an artist of contradiction, even unto self-contradiction. There is the fact, for instance, that though probably "the best" American painter, he has not made the "best" paintings, if that honorific implies some approach to perfection. Except for a brief period of classical equipoise in the late 1940s, he has had no truck with the mystique of "masterpieces." In even the finest of his works since then— and there have been monumental ones—a desolating puritanical fury shadows the expression of his talent. The opposite of serene or reassuring, his achievement haunts our art culture, as the artist haunts the nocturnal studio in my fantasy.

De Kooning was born in Rotterdam in 1904. When he was about five years old, his mother, a bartender in a sailors' cafe, and his father, a wine merchant, were divorced. He started working for his living at age twelve, in a firm of commercial artists and decorators. For eight years of night classes he attended the remarkable Rotterdam Academy, unique in Europe for its preservation of the spirit of medieval guilds, with their union of arts and crafts. (His rigorous technical grounding was one of several things that set him apart from his abstract expressionist peers.) After several misadventures, he made it to the United States, and went to work as a housepainter in Hoboken.

The world of ambitious and sophisticated avant-garde art in Depressionera New York was tenuous, sketchy, and thoroughly underground. (De Kooning did not have his first one-man show until 1948—and did not make a real living as an artist until 1956, when he was fifty-two years old.) Amidst this ragamuffin, prophetic scene, De Kooning's eminence was soon clear, matched only by that of his close friend Arshile Gorky. He simultaneously pursued a style of geometric abstraction and a style of portraiture—the latter most prepossessingly in a series of pictures of anonymous men. These paintings are psychologically bleak, in the spirit of those hard times, and at the same time exhilarating in their virtuosic manipulations of pictorial space and sensitive, all but trembling, color.

I am interested in the pleasure, like a child's pleasure in fairy tales, that I used to feel, and still can with any encouragement, while contemplating the 1930s and '40s in American art, when the epochal energies of abstract expressionism were building. It is nostalgia tinged with nationalism, I suppose, for a golden age of innocence and heroism. I remember getting weepy at De Kooning's last retrospective, at the Museum of Modern Art in 1969, because Pink Angels, a painting from about 1945, was so supremely good for its place and date: expressive of a flourishing, furious sensuality and, at the same time, lofty in its formality, with an aura of pure science in the laboratory of modernism. Moreover, I knew the painting was done in poverty and relative obscurity, thus uncontaminated by commerce and publicity. Moreover, it was American. Vicarious pride filled me, and overflowed.

Sentimental projections of just this sort played a very large role in the reception of abstract expressionism in the '50s and '60s—embarrassing as it may be to recall in our disillusioned day. People never tired, then, of reminding each other that New York had "replaced" Paris as the world's art hub, and of taking this as a kind of personal compliment. It was the era of the Great American Painting, which bore roughly the relation to easel painting that CinemaScope did to previous movie screens, and which vaulted a formerly tiny, embattled avant-garde into an arena of unprecedented public success. Success was painfully, even lethally, confusing to many of the artists (if only, as De Kooning half-joked to me, because they could afford to buy hard liquor for the first time in their lives). With a contrariness at once instinctive and shrewd, De Kooning survived that time by going against the grain, becoming abrasively, solitarily, and definitively himself.

In the context of abstract expressionist aims and ideas, De Kooning emerged as something of an atheist at a tent revival. The list of his Great American Paintings is short, perhaps a single item: the big canvas of 1950, Excavation, in the Art Institute of Chicago (not included in the present show). One of the major summarizing feats of the century, Excavation fused Picassoid contour, late-cubist interfolding space, and mythic poetry—a redolence of ancient and savage rites—into a demonstration of the new "American-type," overwhelming scale. It bracketed painting's past and immediate future in an emblem of terrifically intense presence—such presence, stripped of any allusion to other art, being the holy grail for Pollock, Newman, Rothko, and Still. They made paintings that were, in effect, masterpieces or nothing.

De Kooning demurred, with the series of "Women" paintings that preoccupied him in the early '50s. It is still possible to set a roomful of art people quarreling about those pictures, whose sheer, deliberate indecency—of subject and aesthetic, mood and manner—retains the power to excite and offend.

Woman, I, which De Kooning painted and repainted compulsively for two years, is the keystone of his subsequent legend. The late Harold Rosenberg pretty much constructed his theory of "action painting" on it: the painter as existential gladiator, producing "not a picture but an event." (The same painting set in motion a negative change of mind for Clement Greenberg, formerly De Kooning's major critical supporter; Greenberg increasingly favored an impersonal formalism keyed to the aesthetics of Pollock's drip paintings.) And Woman, I intoxicated a generation of young painters who wrestled with the formidable problem of "doing" De Kooning without being De Kooning.

EACH BRUSHSTROKE, GRIPPING OR BITING THE PICTORIAL SPACE, FEELS LIKE A WHOLE NEW IDEA, A BRAINSTORM...

DE KOONING

Rosenberg was right in suggesting a special significance for the Women, though his rhetoric (and sub-rosa feud with Greenberg) tended to overload the issue. For me, the Women are inspired tantrums. In them, the artist apostrophizes otherness: the otherness of art and of the female, symbolically united in the fleshlike medium of oil paint. De Kooning was assaulting, or flaying, his attachment to art and his sexual desire. The paintings enact the fanatical autonomy of a puritan's conscience, which experiences seduction as catastrophic loss. They also enact the loss—as comedy.

The Women are funny. De Kooning has always insisted as much, mostly in vain where we Americans have been concerned. (Europeans, less given to solemnity in face of art and to rigid moralism in erogenous matters, seem to get it right away.) Their humor arises from the absurdity of the battle they represent, which De Kooning stood no more chance of "winning" than the rabbit in the folk tale did of beating up the baby made of tar. The more ferociously he attacks, the more powerful the image and the painting itself grow. (Compare Picasso, whose variously outraged female forms remain passive, never hitting back as De Kooning's do.) The joke is on the artist, who, like an inept sorcerer, sets out to hex a femme fatale and haplessly conjures up an all-conquering goddess, an annihilating angel.

It is not incorrect, only irrelevant, to interpret the Women as symptoms of a pathology. But they use pathology—of a kind scarcely limited to De Kooning, though it may be limited to men. (Furthermore, consciousness, not wholesomeness, counts in art, and the Women are drenched with consciousness.) Their equally intimate and more general anxiety is about the glittering preciousness of art, conceived by others in De Kooning's generation as abstract and transcendental. One hesitates to call the pictures "subversive"—our museums having had no trouble herding them in with all the other Priceless Treasures—but they continue to mark a vociferous extreme of alienation and doubt. Most disconcerting of all, perhaps, is the way De Kooning violated the decorum of his talent, treating his own phenomenal prowess with something like contempt. Masterpieces and "bestness," the Women declare, are not enough, for either the artist's happiness or the comfort of society. Or: Since our satisfaction cannot be absolute, the hell with it.

De Kooning's fame soared in the late '50s, and so, a bit dubiously, did his inspiration. His formerly classical style, pulverized in the crucible of the Women, reassembled itself in series of romantic, abstract cityscapes and landscapes painted with bravura looseness. His expressiveness became increasingly showy and rhetorical. The strongest of these pictures, like Gotham News, came first. Despite the lyricism, achieved mainly with color, of such later, big-gestured paintings as Door to the River and Pare Rosenberg, it was evident that De Kooning was succumbing to headiness. Perhaps he was doing some equivalent of reading his own press releases: the fulsome critics who, at the time, regularly credited him with possession of a bulletproof Grand Style. In any case, he was riding for a fall.

Then art history delivered a sudden verdict. With the circa-1960 blitzkrieg arrival of pop art and design-oriented abstraction—and draconian minimalism following close behind—De Kooning's visible influence on the course of art abruptly deflated. (I say "visible" because it is hard to find any significant artists of the last quarter century who do not pay him tribute as a father figure, however little their work resembles his.) Roy Lichtenstein's flatly painted image of an "expressive" brush stroke sums up a generational outlook which did to De Kooning's momentarily overblown dignity what the Marx Brothers did to Margaret Dumont.

At about the same time, beset by the importunities of celebrity and the toll of disorderly living, De Kooning withdrew to Long Island, where he concentrated on building his new studio, helping to raise his daughter, and not becoming, he insisted to his friend and most understanding critic, Thomas B. Hess, "a country dumpling." His paintings of the early and middle '60s—light-filled pastoral abstractions, strenuously whimsical women—were attractive, but they marked a precipitous decline in intensity. As I well recall, there was a tendency in the art world to think of him as washed up, a tendency so stubborn that it would take several years for people to start noticing that he was once again a radical artist.

De Kooning's key work of the '60s was in drawing: an astonishing series of figures made with his left hand, with both hands at once, and/or while his eyes were closed. These drawings are eerie records of a talent being encouraged, by its possessor, to degenerate, and of the degenerative process running into a zone of obstinate density, a safety net of obsessive images and irreducible technique. No other body of art I can think of feels at once so totally free and so impersonally determined—a paradox going right to the core of that which we are pleased to call, with almost no idea of what we are talking about, "creativity."

Gradually, the magma tapped in his drawings found its way into De Kooning's paintings and, as a bonus, into a brief but splendid production of cheerful, growlingly energetic bronze sculpture: punched and gouged figures woozy with some fermentation of selfness. From Two Figures in a Landscape (1967) and Montauk I (1969) on, he was back in the business of major painting—not with the consistency of his greater periods but without the pretension of his lesser ones. He remains at work dismantling pictorial form, past the point where it would be hopeless junk in any other hands, and finding that somehow the center—or something—holds.

De Kooning's abstractions since the late '60s, their off-square formats ranging up to seven feet on a side, are not easy; nor are they the fulfilled, nature-saturated, upbeat expressions some people take them for. (Our fondness for the myth of the mellow old master can lead us to force the evidence of our own eyes.) They tend to be exploded and vertiginous compositions, or anticompositions. They are inexhaustibly unpredictable, so much so that only with familiarity is one likely to realize, with a jolt, just how beautiful—gorgeous, really—they are. In an age of fast takes, they demand, but also reward, long and repeated viewings.

A certain amount of lore has collected around these paintings, mostly relating them to the landscape and weather of the Hamptons: how De Kooning mixed paints on the beach to get the exact noncolor of the sand and the precise grayness of the sea. "Country dumpling" or not, however, he remains one of the most indelibly urban artists of an urban century. His borrowings from nature differ little, to my mind, from studio tricks of his— like literally mixing oil and water in an electric blender for the crinkly, puckered textures that result during drying, or plastering a built-up surface with sheets of newspaper, then pulling them off. All such ploys amount to strategic surrenders of control, collaborations with strangeness meant to keep fresh an enterprise ever-threatened by habit. In addition to colors evocative of nature, for instance, De Kooning makes lavish use of the evilest synthetic hues in the painter's kit, phthalo green and alizarin crimson.

The residual ordering principle in most of De Kooning's late work is the brush stroke, completely derhetoricized and freed of any descriptive function. There is simply no way, it appears, that he can maneuver the brush without awakening an almost physical shiver of pleasure in the viewer. Each stroke, gripping or biting the shallow, discontinuous, jostling pictorial space, feels like a whole new idea, a brainstorm that promises to solve everybody's problems forever. But nothing is solved, of course. Each stroke creates new problems necessitating new strokes, new ideas, elsewhere on the canvas, in a dialogue without closure.

Lately, the painterly activity in De Kooning's pictures has slowed way, way down. He is painting flatter and with more economy. He is allowing depicted abstract shapes, reminiscent of nothing else in his work for over thirty years, to reappear. Perhaps he is musing on the long-abandoned biomorphic style he shared with Gorky in the years when only they and a handful of cognoscenti suspected their greatness. There is a sense, in any case, of old forms swimming up from depths of time, or being unearthed archaeologically from ruined civilizations. The new pictures have an elegiac air in tension with bright, even splashy color.

The delights of late De Kooning are strong, but also grueling. He seems to have given up long since any notion of making his art easier for the viewer than it is for himself—and, in a sense, it is perfectly impossible for both. The survival of his mastery, of a kind and quality we may never encounter again, is beset with ultimate, murderous ironies: the absence in today's world, for painting, of necessary meanings and uses, and the consignment of artistic genius to a status at once very expensive and essentially ornamental, or quaint.

What makes De Kooning really "the best," as a model of integrity to outlast our discouragements, is his assimilation of these ironies. His art defines an emptiness in our values, a vacated site of belief and optimism. More than that, his art pronounces the emptiness habitable—and even inspiring of difficult, uncalled-for beauties. In his paintings, disappointment bursts into song.