Page 36 - Studio International - December 1968

hindsight, one sees only the continuity and consistency of his figures. generating itself out of the battle for the feature, now the feature seems
The Glazier of 1940 has all the ingredients of the later work, yet to be generated out of the battle for the picture. The arms in Woman
bound together into a thin, fragile surface as if by an effort of extreme I are almost interchangable with the arms of the chair hacked out of
will. In particular what draws one's attention is the precarious and the viridian background; her breasts, like trodden balloons, are only
problemmatic way with which the figure is related to its surround- lightly anchored and could be exchanged with the window or with
ings. Parts of the figure are painted quite flatly, the dun green-grey the space between her feet. Hence perhaps the energy of her wolfish
of the wall seeming to invade or flow into it. Elsewhere certain glare: only by such ferocity does she hold her own.
features—the trousers, the nose—are split off from the surface, raised The genesis of Woman I is illustrated in Hess with six photographs
from it by sharp modelling. A decanter or flask at his side is a nega- taken at various stages in the painting. It is an extraordinary story.
tive shape in fact, made out of rubbed-down mottled paint belonging At first the figure is set quite clearly into a room- or porch-like space
to an earlier stage of the picture, its profile drawn by the flat green (we do not know whether she is indoors or out) and behind her is a
of the background. This practice, which he would have known all wall and a fully described window. The figure appears to be sretching
about from his sign-painting days, is one that he has exploited ever herself in a wide-winged arm chair. She is far more violently frag-
since. mented than her environment, thrown together out of an assortment
With the seated women of 1943-4 the battle of figure and field of jagged triangles, bows, loops which might have been picked up off
takes place in a freer context and parts of the figures get loosened the floor of Attic. These are smashed into the centre of the picture; it
from the main forms and find new articulations and new scales. is the head with its glaring eyes and lopsided, illustrator's mouth that
These pictures owe a great deal to the seated figures of Matisse and triggers the reading of the parts of the figure. The figure is very much
of Picasso—they are ecole de Paris pictures. An idiom which in the within the picture, set back by long trailing diagonals, and with a
hands of thousands of painters all over the world was simply the marked change of scale between it and the surroundings. As the
formula for faceless, subjectless painting is here the generator of picture advances, going through storms of destruction and revision
unique images. With Pink lady of 1944 the corrections and adjust- that one can only guess at, the figure is invaded by and in turn
ments which accompany the drawing are left uncancelled and are invades the wall behind. It is during the course of this process that
progressively built up into the final image. At first glance the multiple his handling changes its character and becomes more ample, less a
view point of the head, the neck and the arms seems to place it closer matter of 'drawing' and 'painting' but of a vigorous, inclusive
to Picasso than any. But this is not confirmed when one tries to work gesturing, until in the end each accent, each shape can be inter-
out how it got like that. Hess says somewhere that de Kooning's preted directly as a movement of arm or wrist in paint. The shapes
motto could have been an inversion of Picasso's famous remark, i.e. that bound the right breast, for instance, are transparently related
`I do not find, I search,' and in no other picture is the thought more to a particular looping movement and the line crossing the top of the
to the point. The pink flesh, the apple green dress, the yellow ground two breasts is from a fast whip-cracking change of direction; the
are like three shifting substances in constant movement against each herring-shaped fingers are also there-and-back strokes, and so on. All
other. Their flow, accented at points of maximum tension by thin this is carried out at the full scale of the canvas, so that in the end
black lines, carves out bays, inlets, promontories, and leaves, like everything you see is both image and the painter at work, on this
sandbanks and ox-bow lakes, lively remnants of earlier states. The canvas, at this distance. The earlier multiple references and choices
image of the woman is like some underlying geological fact which are still available, but they are now underwritten by the dominating
determines, after all, the limits of aggregation or erosion. What is physical fact of the paint-covered canvas ploughed and harrowed by
particularly important in view of what happens later is the way in a man's arm.
which old markings, split off from their original anchorage, are The works that occupied him between 1955 and '57, pictures like
allowed a floating life of their own. There is a row of nipples like Gotham news, Easter Monday, The time of the fire, represent his paint-
buttons; a previous definition of the neck line is now a capital L; a ing at its highest point of energy. They have lost none of their
pair of blue callipers separates the head from the supporting hand. original fire or mystery. They stand in the same relation to the
During the next few years in works like Pink angels and The marshes, Women of '50—'55 as Attic and Excavation stand to Pink lady. They
figures are suddenly all over the place, swooping, elegant, linear too exploit the campaigns won over the figure in wider, more diffused
shapes whose anatomy grows out of the drawing of parts, trans- terrain. Only now the fragmented imagery of beaks and mouths and
formed in scale and relationship. flying letters has given way to something more realistic, more sober.
These and the works following, the black-and-whites like Light in These are street scenes, crowded urban landscapes, and as one
August and the great all-over pictures of 1949-50, Ashville, Attic, explores their white towering blocks—newspapers, walls,— or fiery
Excavation, are presumably what his reputation as an abstract painter openings—red traffic, windows, lights—one is aware that it is paint
was based upon. Whatever the pictures looked like then, they structure itself that challenges one's fantasies, something as im-
certainly do not now look like pictures which are not 'of' anything. mediate and material as the fabric of the places that the pictures
They teem with images, and their spaces more often than not work evoke.
consistently out of overlapping shapes. Things in them have many This correspondence between the physical fabric of the picture and
lives and many scales. One chooses how one looks and how one takes the imagined world that constructs itself around it becomes more and
them up. A drawing for Attic is plainly based on furniture stored more critical towards the end of the 1950s when he starts on the
under dust sheets. It is still legible as such in the large painting; it is larger, more loosely painted landscapes, such as Parc Rosenberg and
also a conglomeration of figures, torsos, breasts, nipples, limbs. Suburb in Havana. Here the landscape sensations are very literal; they
Fishes swim through it. Mouths open and shut, teeth grin. are also very unstable, for as one presses the pictures more closely
When he returned to the single figures, 'It did one thing for me', he they have a trick of returning to nothing but paint. They are con-
told David Sylvester. 'It eliminated composition, arrangement, structed out of much larger, more daring strokes than before. The
relationships, light—all this silly talk about line, colour and form. standard canvas size is 80 inches by 70. (Notice . . . how 70 inches,
. . . I put it in the centre of the canvas because there was no reason given a landscape sensation, exactly fits the arms-spread gesture of a
to put it a bit on the side.' man,' Hess wrote in the catalogue of the 1962 exhibition.) It was
The underlying 'geological' fact of the frontal image had now to these reckless and flattering pictures that seduced half the painters in
stand up to a far fiercer battering than before. In a sense there is a the world, or so it seemed about eight years ago. Here, wielding a
reversal of the process that made Pink lady. Instead of the picture two-inch brush at full stretch of his arm, the painter was really on
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