Willem De Kooning Art Skin Of His#
Willem De Kooning Art Movie And Magazine#
Willem De Kooning Art Trial Paints Looped#

I too have a de Kooning story but, as is true of many in my generation who missed The Club and Cedar Bar, that story is based on a lucky encounter that meant a great deal to me but nothing, I am sure, to the artist.An abstract, expressionist painter from the Netherlands, Willem de Kooning became an American Master of the 20th Century. Needing to gather my thoughts about an artist whose work had been the focus of my thinking for the past three years and whose example dominated my imagination in early adulthood, I was glad to be away when the announcement came, and thus undisturbed by reporters eager for expert opinions or anecdotes. De Kooning had not been вЂњwithвЂќ the world for a long time, but suddenly he was gone from it. The artist had been in fragile health for years and had recently taken a turn for the worse, but I was still jolted by the irrevocability of the event. I had just left New York where an exhibition of his late paintings at the Museum of Modern Art was still on view.

Even when he was at the center of the New York art world, de Kooning stood apart. De Kooning initially.By the time I met him in the mid вЂ™80s, de Kooning had lived in voluntary exile from Manhattan for almost two decades, but one sensed that his isolation was less a matter of place or moment than of character. Recently de KooningвЂ™s Woman III sold for 137.5 million, becoming the second most expensive painting ever sold.This is evident simply by looking at recent auction records, which value his work in the excess of 27 million dollars.

On the biggest existential question, his naturally comic response echoed that of George Burns. That has come to an end, and it is a mercy.De Kooning did not indulge in solemnity on any subject, death included. Few of us will be granted the easy exit we desire, but fate was particularly cruel in depriving this artist of his wits while leaving him the strength to endure physically. This is a sad hour then, but not as sad, by far, as the seven-year limbo that preceded de KooningвЂ™s disappearance, the purgatorial time during which a man who had lived to paint was idled by infirmity.

Angst was about what happened to you while you were here, not in the hereafter.Women were famously the cause of much of his distress, and boozeвЂ”initially administered as a morning tonic, and later gulped down in blackout quantitiesвЂ”was part of the cure that almost did him in. But I wonвЂ™t know it.вЂќ What mortal dread de Kooning experienced, he kept to himself. If I go to sleep and donвЂ™t wake up, other people will know IвЂ™m dead.

Willem De Kooning Art Skin Of His

Yet it was ambition of a special order and came to the surface after considerable delay. Of all the emotions that may explain an artistвЂ™s work, the most basic is ambition, which in de Kooning was immense and preternaturally tenacious. вЂњFlesh was the reason why oil painting was invented,вЂќ de Kooning repeatedly asserted by the early вЂ™80s he had ceased to rend or flay the skin of his canvases and gave himself over to the pleasures of the slow hand.For de Kooning, angst was mostly about what happened in paintings, and it was in painting that his fears and ecstasies marbled together. During his last working decade, their disembodied contours and soft, transubstantiated flesh pervaded his paintings. And, he seemed, late in life, to have made his peace with them, celebrating the truce with a sublime eroticism.

Willem De Kooning Art Movie And Magazine

When he told Rudy Burckhardt in the вЂ™30s that Picasso was вЂњthe man to beat,вЂќ de Kooning was well aware that there was no chance of beating him at his own game. Unlike the stereotypical vanguard artist, he did not envisage an abrupt, reputationВ—making break with the conventions of the past but instead pursued their systematic dismantling from within. He willed himself to be a major one. That came later, after he had fallen into the company of John Graham, Stuart Davis, and Arshile Gorky and given up his Sunday-painter status along with his economic security, committing himself to art full-time.Following the lead of Gorky, who had apprenticed himself to the School of Paris by self-administered correspondence courses, de Kooning might at first have seemed destined to become a minor master. Movie and magazine images of Western stars Hoot Gibson and Tom Mix were what beckoned him to New York, not the dream of becoming a great modernist.

вЂњMelted PicassoвЂќ the older man reportedly called the younger manвЂ™s style, but it was much more than that. Always careful to keep a safe distance from PicassoвЂ™s withering shadow, de Kooning shared PicassoвЂ™s understanding of and reasons for attacking archetypal figural motifs, and in his own manner matched the latterвЂ™s method of doing so. Violence was initially required to destroy that structure and violence was released by the effort to reconstitute it in a new way.

What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. In 1959 Harold Rosenberg codified вЂњaction paintingвЂќ in these words: вЂњAt a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to actвЂ”rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze or вЂexpressвЂ™ an object, actual or imagined. Which is why the subsequent avant-gardes have tended to ignore them, on the one hand, and, on the other, weed-strong reactionaries have dismissed them altogether or lamented their late careers, comparing these to earlier achievements with dismay.Even de KooningвЂ™s timely partisans missed the point. Inevitably, that turned Picasso and de Kooning into conservatives of a sort, but within their purview they remained radicals.

Willem De Kooning Art Trial Paints Looped

In de KooningвЂ™s work freshness was paramount, and it resulted from the innovative manipulation of traditional means in response to the premeditated disruption of one set of studio routines by the seemingly arbitrary recourse to another. Thus, while Pollock unleashed a chain reaction that exploded the container of modern painting, giving rise to such genres as happenings, installation, and performancesвЂ”pioneered by Allan Kaprow in America, Gutai in Japan, and the Austrian Actionists in EuropeвЂ”de Kooning held the fragments his destructive procedures produced close to his body, and rearranged them within the relatively constant field it described.Acknowledging PollockвЂ™s genius, and his role in вЂњbreaking the iceвЂќ for his contemporaries, de Kooning persisted in the faith that painting owed nothingвЂ”least of all its demiseвЂ”to the future, and everything to the present. De Kooning always painted on an easel, preferred ordinary oil pigments, and with the exception of Excavation, 1950, and a few other works, stuck to canvases scaled to his reach. Pollock improvised straight-out-of-the-can with industrial paints looped across canvases of various dimensions (some vast and others long and frieze-like) laid down on the ground. The image was to be the result of this encounter.вЂќAlthough this may have been true of Pollock, it was never true of de Kooning, to whose camp Rosenberg ironically belonged.