On de Kooning's Late Style

Author(s): Robert Rosenblum

Source: Art Journal , Autumn, 1989, Vol. 48, No. 3, Willem de Kooning, on His Eighty-
Fifth Birthday (Autumn, 1989), pp. 248-249
Published by: CAA

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/776948

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 Mondrian had done more programmati-
On de Kooning's Late Style where angels no longer fear to tread. An
uncannily white and sun-shot luminositycally, the elemental purity of yellow,
dominates these paintings in which red, and blue, colors that, within the
o concerned has our century been
flamelike contours, once belonging, we
luminous ether of a white ground, keep
with the forward-looking thrills of
feel, to some physical thing, a body or alternating
a between line and plane, sub-
youthful innovation that for decades, the
stance and void. And again like Mon-
landscape, gyrate in a kind of spiritual
late styles of many of our most venerable
drian, de Kooning offers here a new
perpetuum mobile. The slathering,
major and minor masters-from Picas-
crusty brushwork that typified the sur- sense of a centrifugal, expansive open-
so, Braque, and de Chirico to Chagall
faces of de Kooning's paintings from the ness, challenging the more conventional
and Picabia-have been slighted by
indifference or downright insult. But as
late 1940s on, the frequent sense of sense of up and down, load and support
our century approaches its own frighten-
congestion and impasse that gave histhat marked much of his earlier work in
canvases of the late 1970s the character which the human figure dominated the
ing sunset years, the mellowness of ripe horizon.
of tormented struggle and search have
old age and retrospection have slowly
become positive, not negative values. finally evaporated here in a buoyant, Of course, together with the puritani-
Such thoughts are prompted here by the
airborne realm. cal impulse to purge and to cleanse,
presentation of an anthology of paint- But apart from the joyous shock of there is always in de Kooning the linger-
ings executed in the three years from looking at paintings that translate the ing remembrance of erotic things past,
1983 to 1986 by one of our century's open skies and winged movement of a so that Mondrian's immaterial bones
Baroque ascent to heaven into de Koon- are replaced here by subliminal evoca-
oldest living great masters, Willem de
Kooning, who, for a long time, tended to
ing's now familiar language, these pic- tions of curving body parts and orifices.
be written out of art history after he had tures offer moving Proustian recalls of It is a tonic and exalting combination,
scorched his name in it forever with the the artist's own early work, especially this seraphic fusion of flesh and spirit.
indelible Woman series of the early from the years before 1947, when he was Nurtured by the most intense privacy,
seeking his own full-scale identity. The by uninterrupted contemplation of his
1950s. As with Picasso in his late years,
the center-stage excitement of new repertory of shapes here, in which own past as man and as artist, de Koon-
fluent, but fragmentary contours swell ing's recent canvases now enter the pub-
young artists and movements made de
and contract with the pressures of living lic domain of late-style miracles in the
Kooning appear more and more her-
metic in his art as in his life, and he flesh, recalls the frequently humanoid pantheon of Western painting.
anatomical parts found in paintings of
began to lose, in the catchword of the Robert Rosenblum
1960s, his "relevance." But in the 1980s,
the late 1930s and early 1940s; and the
slippery dualities of a Janus-faced boun- (Courtesy Anthony D'Offay Gallery,
all is scrambled again, and just as
dary line that seems simultaneously to London.)
younger artists are newly responding to
refer to both its sides is again a resurrec-
the widest spectrum of historical styles, tion of much earlier efforts to annihilate
from Constructivism to Abstract Ex-
matter and gravity in a field of crackling
pressionism, so too are most of us look-
ing with less prejudiced eyes at theenergies. But these reincarnations of
youthful pictorial inventions, at a dis-
totality of work by artists who used to
tance of some forty years, are now trans-
seem important only at the moment they
entered the heroic drama of modern formed into a bodiless, purified lan-
guage that would strip everything down
art's future-oriented, lockstep evolution.
And in the case of these recent paintings
to some impalpable core. And here, sur-
prisingly, de Kooning even invokes,
by de Kooning, a very different kind of
across the century and across the Atlan-
drama of looking backwards, of reclu-
sive meditation can be savored. tic to the Holland of his youth, one of
his own Dutch pictorial ancestors,
By the early 1980s, de Kooning, once Mondrian.
an enfant terrible of what in the 1950s Born in Rotterdam in 1904 and resid-
was called for foreign export "The New
ing in the Netherlands until he settled in
American Painting," had become such
the United States in 1926, de Kooning
an international establishment figure
that he could be elected to honoraryhas often been allied with the great
membership of Britain's Royal Acad-Baroque masters of the Low Countries,
whether in specific allusions to Rem-
emy of Arts, an honor that surely
brandt's paintings of women, more gen-
entitled him, at the age of seventy-nine,
eral references to Hals's bravura brush-
to remain in the ivory-tower studio of his
work, or on the other side of the Dutch
art and his life in East Hampton, at the
Atlantic extremity of Long Island.border, an affinity to Rubens's robust
equation of pink, zaftig flesh with the
There, in a prolific flow of large can-
juicy textures of pigment. But in de
vases, he pruned the jungle-like density
of his acres and decades of painting Kooning's recent paintings, the opposite
side of this Netherlandish coin is
experience to an ethereal simplicity.
Often, the late styles of many of the old
approached via the precedent of Mon-
masters-Titian, Rembrandt, Turner- drian's insistent paring down of the flesh
are characterized by a triumph over and muscle of painting to some weight-
less skeleton. It is fascinating to see here
matter, whether the stuff of paint, or the
how de Kooning distills the complexity
palpability of people and things; and theand shuffle of his earlier colors to a
works of this modern octogenarian now
enter, too, this otherworldly realm,rainbow clarity, often extracting, as

Fall 1989 249

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 De Kooning exhibition, Sidney Janis Gallery, October-November 1972.

248 Art Journal

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