William de Kooning

Willem De Kooning had a considerable underground reputation among New York artists from the mid-1930's, yet he did not have his first one-man show until 1948, the year Pollock's "drip" paintings were exhibited. The black-andwhite abstractions he showed then established him as a leading Abstract Expressionist. In these and all of his subsequent paintings, Willem De Kooning tried to embody his anxious and restless life style.

In order to translate his evolving life style into art, Willem De Kooning relied on the unpremeditated act of painting, which enabled him to keep a picture open to new and unexpected possibilities and to purge it of habitual, atrophied mannerisms, much as Pollock had with the "drip" technique. The sense of openness to experience is evoked by the qualities of ambiguity and fluidity of Willem De Kooning's works. As the eye moves in and out of interpenetrating areas, it picks up ever changing combinations and permutations - a multiplicity of meanings - that symbolize De Kooning's uneasy way of living and perhaps his attempt to express the entirety of his experience (an impossible ambition). His "nervousness" is also conveyed by the very manner of his painting, which is agitated and exhibits traces of innumerable revisions - changes of mind that bespeak a sense of self-doubt.

Willem De Kooning's response to the pressures of his immediate experience caused him to diverge as radically from the past as Pollock had. Yet, simultaneously, he revealed his links to European art more explicitly than Pollock. What De Kooning said of Cubism applied to his own work: "It didn't want to get rid of what went before. Instead it added something." De Kooning's ties to tradition are manifested in his technique of painting, his use of the human image, of spatial depth, and of a Cubist infrastructure. His gestures are brushed and scraped rather than "dripped" and so are less accidental, though not less unpremeditated, than Pollock's.

Willem De Kooning's choice of the human figure as subject matter was another indication of his attachment to past art. He was one of a group of twentiethcentury revolutionaries - including Matisse, Picasso, Leger, Klee, Soutine, and Miro - who strove for human images that would bear no reference to lifeless, outworn conventions. He was also attracted to figuration because of his love of "the vulgar and fleshy part" of Western art, indeed of flesh itself, "the stuff people were made of" and "the reason why oil painting was invented." The human form is bulky and exists in space; Willem De Kooning refused to deny it volume and depth, but he also insisted on asserting the picture surface. There are various means of reconciling the three-dimensionality of the figure with the flatness of the canvas plane: mass can be leveled by suppressing modeling; the body can be fragmented into planar anatomical shapes and spread across the surface (the device favored by the Cubists); or the parts of the figure can be opened up and merged with the background to constitute a single image. At different times, Willem De Kooning employed all these methods.

Willem De Kooning had only painted in his spare time before his employment by the WPA in 1935-36. After a year on the Project (until Congress passed a law barring aliens), he decided to do odd jobs on the side. His mode of living remained the same, but art became his vocation rather than his avocation.