Page 27 - Studio International - January 1973

Thomas Hess, an early and loyal champion, to have originated from quasi-automatist with the placing of tone and colour upon the
as reluctant to seek syntheses for apparently elements and procedures — freely painted canvas and thus involves the viewer in
antithetical concerns.36 Certainly, much of the letters and numerals, cut-and-pasted fragments modalities of 'space-perception' (gradations
tension inherent in all de Kooning's work of figures, collage juxtapositions, etc. — which of `modelling'). Even after the introduction of
derives from the irresolute nature of the are integrated and absorbed as the painting collage in 1912, the Cubists could not really
relationships between such antinomes as progresses, not only as formal motifs, but as cope with the spatial modalities implied by
image and ground, painting and canvas, aspects of an asymptote of some final position. colour without resorting to strong silhouettes
colouring and drawing, illusion and flatness, As the end-product of this process of and flat forms, essentially characteristic of
and between the autobiographical accumulation, absorption and even `drawing' functions. (Hence, largely, Synthetic
instantaneousness of perception — response, cancellation, the painting enshrines not only, Cubism. Delaunay's Orphism seemed to offer
vision, glance, glimpse, etc. — on the one hand, like Pollock's works of 1946, the 'history' of an alternative, but only by 'abandoning'
and the interminable complexity of fitting its content, but the very tensions still instinct substantiality altogether.)
together and fitting in on the other. In his in the strivings of motifs from a world of motifs There is an overwhelmingly warm-blooded
willingness to 'suspend' the painted subject in each to occupy a significant place in the aspect to de Kooning's subjects and devices —
the procedures of its formulation, de Kooning restricted world of the canvas. Attic of 1949 an aspect notably lacking in, for instance,
is close to Pollock. Beside their mature works and Excavation of 1950 stand comparison with Picasso's cubist portraits of 1910 and even in
even Kline's paintings look finished. any other twentieth-century painting. cubist paintings of the nude. (See the Picasso
In his figure paintings of c. 1938 to 1945 In the drawing/painting dichotomy, the Nude Figure in the Albright Knox Gallery,
(from Two Men Standing, say, to Pink Angels) scale of cubist painting ultimately favoured Buffalo, N.Y., one of the greatest of all cubist
and even more forcefully in the great series of drawing. (Perhaps its large scale was one paintings, and one which de Kooning must
Women which began in 195037, de Kooning reason why the Demoiselles d'Avignon could surely have known well; there is an almost
recapitulated a problem which had obsessed never be 'finished'.)39 De Kooning's total avoidance of flesh tones and tints in this
Cezanne and which the Cubists had not solved, enlargement of the scale of the canvas, to a painting; it is not convincingly 'human'.)
but only camouflaged : how to allow, or create point at which a stroke with a house-painter's Cubism could never cope adequately with
`equivalence' for those objects or spaces or brush is read as the nearest thing to 'line', spherical forms; the curve of a guitar or a
forms whose presence binocular vision and favoured painting procedures even in contexts glass, even a profiled buttock, these could be
locomotor ability allow us to confirm in the real where there appeared to be a delineating rendered by line; but shoulders, temples and
world, but which are hidden from view, function. The result is to suspend the process breasts were always points of crisis in cubist
squeezed out or desubstantiated in the of identification in a welter of modalities. paintings. Many of these crises were
inevitably selective process of transfer to a In the absence of other clues — such as shading recapitulated in de Kooning's work of the
two-dimensional surface. Cezanne could not or the use of perspective — drawing early forties; the Glazier, for instance, of
paint the wall behind the Femme a la Cafetière, (essentially a monochrome process) is a matter c. 1940 is 'the result of hundreds of studies on
but he seems to have been passionately of plan and elevation. To establish coexistence how to paint a shoulder'40 and the painting
concerned to 'make room' for it, however of the two upon the same surface (as Juan remains unintegrated. But the Women, the
shallow the space at his disposal and however Gris did, for instance, in works of 1912-16) seated women of the early forties and more
substantial the figure it enclosed. De Kooning is not to offer an equivalent for the magisterially the great series of 1950-53,
continually poses himself similar problems for space-generating function of painting. address themselves above such incidental
the reconciliation of competing realities: (1) the Painting is a process essentially concerned problems. Their great globular breasts outface
world depicted; the figure in a given space; (2)
the flatness of the canvas and the nature of the
paint. In painting, illusion has conventionally
served to mediate between the two; it is a
condition of the latter which serves the former.
De Kooning's nature is not to reconcile. He
allows figure to be invaded by ground, ground
to be absorbed by figure. The ontology of the
painting remains provisional in a sense which
implies something more than the equivocation
we associate with the use of illusion.
It seems almost as if the very drying of the
paint, the 'literal' congealing of the image,
tipped the scales too far over for de Kooning's
satisfaction. The de Kooning mythology is
replete with stories of paintings delivered
dripping wet to exhibitions, of devices
employed to delay the drying process, of
continual cancellation, revision and
readjustment of apparently 'finished'
(`resolved') paintings."
This 'suspension' is most readily apparent in
the single-figure paintings, but in fact it finds
perhaps its most intense expression in those
works of 1946-50 which are near-abstract
conglomerations of suggestive shapes (from the
first black-and-white paintings, Light in
August, etc., through to Attic and Excavation).
These remarkable, dense paintings seem mostly Willem de Kooning, Excavation, 1942. Museum of Modern Art, New York
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