Page 38 - Studio International - December 1968

his athletic mettle. The whole ethos of spontaneity, the picture-as- The recent figures, it seems to me, are far from being the relaxed
the-act was on test and only a painter of de Kooning's courage and repetitions that some have seen them as. He has withdrawn from the
Protean virtuosity could have sustained it for so long. fruitless exposure of Action Painting. They are tougher in a way,
Action Painting in the literal sense that is given by these pictures, although at first sight their trembling bagginess would suggest the
is a red herring. Suburb in Havana looks as meretricious as any painting opposite. They reintroduce the kind of drawing that finds an edge
which exploits illusionistic devices too literally. De Kooning's doubts between an imagined form and its field; that is to say, space is trans-
and adventures are too near the surface. There is an element of formed in them and is not tied simply to the exigencies of paint.
fighting talk : how can we (or he) believe simultaneously in the soul- Lovers melt into the grass. A woman bathes alone, and if she is both
searching question posed by the improvisatory method and in the moving and horrifying, squatting and snapping with her spread legs,
crashing conclusions of these gut-bucket strokes? The kind of spaces this inclusive ambiguity of mood is faithful to the dishevelled and
that are hacked out here with massive repoussoirs, crossings and generous tradition that he has established over forty years.
spatters are literal and without resonance; the initial excitement of All along he has alternated between batches of figures when his
tearing into the painting, as if down a curtained corridor, has a short attention is focussed on a central image that returns his glance, and
life. I see these pictures like projects for unrealized stage sets, or as dispersed paintings—landscapes, interiors, `abstracts'— where there is
sculptor's drawings, that is to say, as provisional. They are the no focal grimace. Either mode has supported his preoccupation
opposite from that search for the definitive and the unique which with the mystery of figure and field, the question 'where is it?' And
was Action Painting's central claim: they need not be how they are— either has supported in widely differing ways his drive towards self
they could be otherwise. revelation, expressed earlier in the introspective melancholy of the
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