Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Willem de Kooning
American, Dutch; 20th-century
New York, NY: Gagosian (Exhibition: Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting)
78%
Woman (Green). 1953-55. Oil and charcoal on canvas
You get the sense that de Kooning was the least grounded — the most crafty and materials-obsessed, at the expense of the integrity of his paintings — of all the AbEx artists except maybe Still, and that the "women" were an attempt to give his paintings the appearance of structure without actually structuring them very much. Thing is, it works, at least in this particular piece. Take those two near-identical pink rectangles with cilia swinging out of their bottom right corners. The one at center left serves as a crook in the woman's figure, the other (at right, just north of center) recedes behind the yellow it's set against and thereby offers up a hint of dimensionality to the space. These significances stem from the fact that the painting is doing representation, however cheekily; without that clownish phiz and breasts, they'd have no reason not to get lost in the maelstrom. And it is a maelstrom, especially of color: the greens are so various and the yellows so jumbled and the black linework so resistant to actually bounding any forms, it's tough to find your footing. Whether the "conceptual" solution to the problem — the representation — speaks to de Kooning's folly or prescience isn't quite clear to me; what it is that, though with large limitations, it works. (TFS, 2025)
New York, NY: Gagosian (Exhibition: Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting)
72%
Untitled XIX. 1984. Oil on canvas
I'll always remember the essay where Donald Kuspit, after seeing these last de Koonings, lambastes the artworld for its venality and lack of taste: they're evidently soggy late works, he says, made by a man whose mind and capacity for artistic greatness had been eroded by dementia; it's only a criminal who could prop up an artist in front of a canvas and force his hand — no brain behind it — to scratch off some final product. I'm not one to doubt the criminality of anyone who sells art, but looking at this painting I feel like Kuspit had it wrong. There was always a decorative strain in de Kooning, but it's not till these late-late paintings that it manages to present itself without embarrassment, unfettered. (If it was senility that took away the artist's wryness, all the better.) You can't say that the outcome isn't mixed — this painting's lack of depth (primary colors on solid white ground) shackles it to a sort of prettiness that good Abstract Expressionism, for all its faults, is never really at risk of — but in several key aspects it works better than even the best of the artist at his prime. For one, its forms present themselves, at first glance, as hard-edged, firmly placed, almost uncompromising. But then you recognize how lightly painted they are in spots, how much variety there is to Willem's handling; it's a nice dichotomy. For two, there are constant moments of inspired design that, if they don't quite save the painting from how easy it is to look at, at least manage to make this easiness aesthetically legitimate. Look at the way the tip of that leg of blue glances over the top edge red arc beneath it in the painting's bottom right, or at how much breathing room there is in the top left corner. Things are convolved as they always are in de Kooning, but there's a clarity here to the way any one form relates to another that's rare in anything else the artist made. (TFS, 2025)
New York, NY: Gagosian (Exhibition: Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting)
56%
Standing Figure. 1969-84. Bronze
When I was sitting in front of this thing (till a guard told me to get up off the floor...) I wrote in my notes that "it relies too much on its monumentality, which it doesn't ever justify." Then later I read that de Kooning, never having sculpted, was encouraged by Henry Moore to make something in the round, so he futzed around with some clay and made some small models, a couple of which were later blown up to monumental scale and cast in bronze. Hence how awkwardly Standing Figure inhabits its size. Plus, it seems to suffer from an overall suppleness of form and texture that's not quite borne out by the way its individual parts relate to the whole — each of its "limbs," including those feet, seem to contradict that big weighty belly and the variegation of its surface. (Perhaps coincidentally, something like this is what Moore suffers from, too.) A few things, though, it does get right: its lateral extension and slight directionality give it a sense of movement that works productively against its bigness; if its organicism doesn't quite land, it's at least not a bland recapitulation of the other hard edges and austerity of other Modern Metal Monumentalists (Calder, di Suvero). (TFS, 2025)