Woman I - Willem de Kooning
Man Painting Women: The Figurative Abstractions of Willem de Kooning
The first painting in a series simply and plainly titled Women painted by the artist during the height of his career as a noted Ab-Ex painter. Uniquely known for neither abandoning figuration nor for forfeiting references to the Surrealists Willem de Kooning was know for works like this. The distortion of the bodily proportions and the angular nature of the face are very Cubist in inspiration but there are also far more primitive inspirations, the distinctly plump figure refers back to the oldest fertility totems like the Willendorf Venus with the contrasting angular face of the woman however harkens back to Cykladian sculpture.
The painting is not without de Kooning’s own style though, the woman though distorted is distorted on a very single flat plane instead of the Cubist multi-focal figurative style. Much like the women of his time, the women of De Kooning seemingly disappear into the background or what certain art critics call his “no-environments” yet at the same time there is a celebration of the woman’s figure as well also highlighting her fashionable clothing. The thick discernible brush strokes, sporadic use of sketching tools like charcoal and pencils also give the painting a very hectic and unfinished feeling to it typical of the so called Action Painters of his time and social circle.
The cool flatness of the painting and its focus on fashionable and glamorous people also predates the Pop Art movement by nearly a decade technically two since the Women series.
On The Artist
Born in Rotterdam to an absentee father and bartender and bar owner for a mother Willem de Kooning or Bill to his friends wanted to be an artist from an early age dropping formal education at age twelve to do apprentice work for a commercial design firm before getting a formal arts education at an arts school in Rotterdam. Early on he showed an attraction to De Stijl (The Style, Netherlands’ big avant-garde art movement) with its focus on the artist as a craftsman as well as experiments in form and colour. This experience in a formal art academy also makes de Kooning the most formally trained of the abstract expressionists save for perhaps Robert Motherwell who had a broad liberal arts education at Stanford and Harvard and Helen Frankthaler who also had an extensive collegiate education.
Bill decided to make the very brave decision to stowaway on a sailing ship in 1924 to gain access to America, working his way up from Virginia all the way to the current cultural hub of America, New York. Willem took jobs as commercial artist, windowdresser and work in fashion magazines. It was tough going but in his own words “he would rather be poor in New York than rich in Philadelphia” (said after rejecting a paying commission job).
Fortunately things picked up, the Works Progress Administration had provided opportunities for many artists, Bill included, to practice their art while also having their work subsidised through government programs and aid packages. It was at this time he developed a wide circle of artistic friends culminating in his friendship with art critic Harold Rosenberg, it was Rosenberg who dubbed Willem and his fellow abstract expressionists as “Action Painters” (the term emphasises the importance of the gestural techniques used in Abstract Expressionist and where their paintings derive their emotional power from).
He also met his future wife Elaine Fried during this time, she was a student of his as well as a model for his early and still defined figurative portrait work. Elaine herself became an art critic and prominent portrait artist whose work I will be covering next. Their relationship was rocky, very rocky as well as tempestuous and alcohol-fuelled. Though everything de Kooning did was alcohol-fuelled, he was prodigious in his consumption of liquor, it put Pollock to shame. Elaine and Bill separated but never divorced mostly due to their numerous extra-marital affairs between the both of them.
The post WWII years are widely regarded to be his most mature works beginning with a series of monochrome paintings (he couldn’t afford pigments, rationing and scarcity made the vivid artistic pigments as a luxury) using household acrylics in his signature biomorphic and abstract forms. Following that up is the Women series which was first displayed at the Charles Egan almost a decade after he started them and would continue for another two decades after. De Kooning’s friend the photographer Rudy Burckhardt took a series of photos of him at work for an article on his artistic process that ran in the papers.
Kooning also ran into controversy, his reintroduction of figurative elements to the world of abstract painting caused a stir with some of the Greenberg school “post-painterly abstraction” artists (Greenberg believed that art had evolved beyond the need for figure or even technique, he championed the colour field painters and the like) But he didn’t care, he continued to work the way he wanted because he just liked painting what he wanted to paint. He would eventually form a small group that would do the two things he loved, talk about art and drink, at the Cedar Tavern.
Eventually he moved upstate, he began a series of landscapes called the Parkway series where he painted abstract landscapes as though they were being watched from a moving car, he began experimenting with sculpture, developed a more vivid and gestural pure abstract body of work. Not as widely known but it was influential on the West Coast Ab-Ex painters. De Kooning however soon experienced the cognitive decline associated with the ravages of old age. It became the centre of a huge discussion on the nature of creativity mostly because it was about art retailers squabbling over how they could best keep the prices of his work high. Eventually the prevailing opinion became “Consciousness matters little, de Kooning never though of himself as a conscious painter neither did the other Ab-Ex painters.” He passed away at the age of 97 having left behind an extensive and varied body of art that defined several artistic movements, a few widely disseminated art theories and a definitive body of Abstract Expressionist works.
