Page 34 - Studio International - December 1968

De Kooning's 'Women'

A de Kooning retrospective is at the Tate Gallery from December 5 to January 26

Andrew Forge

De Kooning's mess is salutary. He is in eternal opposition to all obviously of the artist.
prescriptive views of painting, and whatever he has done, good or `I used to get so involved in drawing elusive things like noses,' he
bad, is a witness to the fact that content in painting is somehow re- told an interviewer. 'Imagine how the shadow falls on the fleshy
lated to an art that refuses to draw boundaries round itself. part of the nose, and how are you going to render it with a hard
He paints in the first person ; he is within his work, surrounded by it, pencil? These are the drawing problems that can drive you nuts, that
and although his position is as reflective and as humorous as any you have to give up.'
painter's, there is no mocking of what he is doing, no ironic reserva- The women are members of a different race. They enter with fan-
tion. fares. To date there are four main groups : the ones that look like
`Actually', he said of Renaissance painting in an article published in Bette Davis of 1943-6, the ones that look like wolves in grand-
1951, `there was no subject-matter. What we call subject-matter now, mother's clothing of 1950-5, the fragmented series on paper of 1961
was then painting itself.' It is an idea that can be applied directly to and the girls like laughing cow-pats which have occupied him since
his own painting. He covers a vast range of material, from match 1964. The anxious containment of the early interiors is dispersed
boxes to empty oceans, from numerals to brassieres, from pastoral once and for all by them. Where almost all the men give the impre-
landscapes and lovers to city streets and old newspapers. And this is sion of having been at some stage worked from observation, the
paralleled by a gamut of language which runs between the most women do not. It is as though their jostling presence, regal, shrill and
precise illusionism and allusions which are so tenuous as to be almost bedecked, puts an end to contemplation and stillness. The need is not
invisible within the paint that supports them. But wherever one picks so much to coax something on to the canvas as to keep abreast there
up the thread one is aware that to split off one attribute of his paint- with their chattering ebullience.
ing at the expense of another is to miss what the picture is about. What kind of women are they ? Hess and de Kooning himself have
made a good deal of their archaic origins, but this seems to be true
The figures in his pictures are active presences which appear to be only in a psychological sense, not a stylistic one. They are very real,
living by their own energy. They are not lay-figures, propped up in very modern. Some are mere presences, grinning wolf-like from the
limbo, nor posing models. Neither are they masterful personifica- matted surface of the canvas, others are fully characterized with con-
tions, nor the butts of expressionist passion. They seem to have un- sistent detail like the great seven-foot Woman with bicycle of 1953 who
limited independence, and yet to be close upon us, to exist at the is of a piece from her vast looming bust to her slender well-preserved
picture's brink. ankles. They are all sexually aggressive. What varies is the spirit with
Up to about 1942 his figures are almost exclusively men; after that which they threaten. Some seem all gathered up into their breasts,
they are women. As a matter of fact, the division now appears to be like strutting birds, furies, the breasts swollen to absorb the whole
sharper than one had supposed because Thomas B. Hess has revised torso. Others, less formidable, seem caught in positions of ludicrous
some of the dates in his present catalogue, putting the first group of embarrassment, knock-kneed in nothing but their knickers, side by
women into the years 1943-6, whereas in his book on de Kooning side like children. But it is not really they who are embarrassed. A
published nearly a decade ago he had made them overlap by three room full of the most recent figures can induce real genital panic. At
years with the male subjects. the same time, these are the most jolly, like those formidable and
The men stand or sit, singly or in pairs, in dim rooms. Usually there wonderful girls who laugh off the shaming aspects of sex and make
is a single object at their side, a vase, or a picture on the wall, nothing everything all right.
else. They wear overalls, working shirts or the kind of long coats that Somebody once told me of how at the height of an impossible love
storemen wear, and the folds and creases in the clothes are treated affair he had seen the Massacre at Chios in the Louvre and how for
with peculiar emphasis, a clear-cut classical attention that seems to days he had haunted it: it had been the only way he could find to
lift the garments outside the blunt, mundane circumstance of the assuage his unhappiness, a place to put it all. I can imagine a hag-
pose. This localized intensity recurs in the features where, although ridden man regaining his wits in front of de Kooning's hilarious
the faces seem often to be hardly there at all, so tentatively are they troupers.
painted, the eyes are forced in tone, highly defined. This gives them The furore that greeted the 'Women' at the time of the 1953 exhibi-
an intent, concentrated look quite unlike the moody gaze of the tion seems extraordinary at this distance. The issue of whether he was
figures in Blue Period Picasso with which they invite comparison. an abstract or a figurative painter seems quite stupid. Everything
Hess records that de Kooning did in fact use a lay-figure at this that he has ever painted can be seen 'as' something, can be read. And
time, dressed in overalls; but it is easier to see these figures as self- in any case, only about four years lay between that batch of women
portraits. They have that dry look, and the poses, particularly in the and the ones that preceded them. One reason for the uproar was
important Seated man of 1939 and The glazier of 1940 suggest an artist probably that during those years he had become some sort of chef
working with two mirrors. Drawings relating to these pictures are d'école and was the victim of other people's expectations. Now, with
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