Willem de Kooning: the King of post-World War II Painters
The best modern painting, though it is mostly abstract painting, remains naturalistic in its core
Not only does “koning” translated into English mean “king,” I contend that Willem de Kooning, during the decade of his finest work (ca. 1946-56), is the greatest post-war painter of them all. While his compositions began life with the stylistic innovations of abstract masters such as Kandinsky and Gorky, the Dutch-American master, in effect, put “cubist bones” into them. In achieving this he avoided the perilous pratfall endemic to all abstractionists: namely falling into “mere decoration” -- a sin which not even Gorky, his great teacher and primary early model, was able to surmount.
The foremost innovator of abstract painting, Wassily Kandinsky, endowed his early work with structural integrity by the fact it evolved out of landscape painting in which he employed biomorphic forms distilled from natural imagery. His later work, however, does not employ this nature-derived scaffolding and corresponding iconography so that, in a sense, it spatially lacks a formal reason for existing. The shapes and figures, which are usually geometrical, are organized on the canvas in relationship to one another, but without the overarching unity and reason-for-being that a convincingly painted space, however imaginary, produces for them to inhabit.
In other words it is possible to regard these later works of Kandinsky as decoration -- though decoration of the utmost imagination, skill, and resourcefulness.
“The best modern painting," writes Clement Greenberg, "though it is mostly abstract painting, remains naturalistic in its core, despite all appearances to the contrary. It refers to the structure of the given world both outside and inside human beings. The artist who, like the Nabis, the later Kandinsky, and so many of the disciples of the Bauhaus, tries to refer to anything else walks in a void.”
Confronting de Kooning in his early work was the same formal obstacle that had to be addressed by Cezanne vis-a-vis Impressionism: How to give depth and structural integrity to an idiom almost exclusively concerned with surfaces. Willem de Kooning’s solution to prevent himself from "walking into a void where decoration waits in ambush" -- as so many painters before him had done and so many continue to do -- was to, first, use tracing paper to arrange in superimposition biomorphic forms derived from female models; and, second, to employ the cobbled-together multi-limbed entity, in charcoal outline, as the compositional basis of his art, almost as if it were the subject in stealth.
Put another way, in his greatest paintings de Kooning uses black as a sort of exoskeleton.
But what about de Kooning’s less than stellar achievements?
The Swooning Devolution of de Kooning
Tracing Willem de Kooning’s stylistic evolution during his peak decade as one of the world’s greatest painters — roughly 1946-1956 — it’s fascinating to consider how his later (and lesser) abstract paintings appear to have evolved out of the “Woman” configurations.
The notorious appearance of “Woman” as proclaimed subject matter which began appearing in Dek's work around 1948 was only to bring to the surface and make explicit what had been going on subliminally.
Here is de Kooning at the peak of his powers circa 1948, in a nervously intense, deliriously complicated, jazzy multi-leveled urban tapestry:
Now here’s a later Woman painting from 1953 where you can see how he’s simplified and even coarsened his idiom as far as brushwork is concerned in order to direct more of his energies towards bringing the subject into being:
A later abstraction, such as “The Time of Fire” from 1956, stylistically takes off from the Women series with his chastened and coarsened idiom, albeit without the explicit subject matter:
Then a little later -- in 1957 -- he’s making deep inroads towards what I call “De Kooning Lite” in “Palisade”:
Soon thereafter he fully achieves “De Kooning Lite” in 1958’s “Suburb in Havana”:
By 1960 the great Dutch-American painter is pretty much a spent force as an abstractionist with a wispy pastoral palette that almost seems like a revocation and renunciation of his incredibly rich urbanist ideations from the prior two decades.