‘Willem de Kooning Drawing’ Review: Laying Down the Line
At the Art Institute of Chicago, a survey of the Abstract Expressionist’s work demonstrates how central sketching was to his practice and how creatively he approached it.
Chicago
“Drawing” in “Willem de Kooning Drawing,” the title of a revelatory exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, is not a noun denoting a single work of art. Rather, it is a participle, derived from the verb “to draw” to describe an ongoing practice. The distinction matters, because the show’s curators, the Art Institute’s Kevin Salatino and Mel Becker Solomon, have interpreted De Kooning’s lifelong practice of drawing in the broadest possible terms. As Mr. Salatino reminds us, the artist “drew incessantly and famously blurred the line between drawing and painting,” an idea that justifies the inclusion of important paintings (many from the Institute’s own collection). The thesis is enlarged by a small group of sculptures, and works on paper and other supports, in many different mediums and techniques. Add the fact that the selection reflects how De Kooning always courted ambiguity—fusing abstraction and representation, and combining vernacular and even comic-strip references with elegant demonstrations of high aspirations and refined technique—and you have a sense of the exhibition’s wide-ranging richness.
A joint project of the Art Institute and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, where it will be seen this fall, “Willem de Kooning Drawing” is a full retrospective, beginning with a meticulously rendered still life made about 1919-21, when the Rotterdam-born artist (1904-1997), still a teenager, studied nights at the local art academy in Rotterdam (now the Willem de Kooning Academy). It ends with an untitled abstraction of sparse, athletic blue and black lines, made in 1985, when, as De Kooning’s physical and mental condition deteriorated, only his fluent, over-scaled gestures remained, like the skeleton of earlier, denser paintings.
In between is a wealth of notably diverse works, including a group of satirical drawings, made about 1924, when De Kooning hoped to become an illustrator, before he arrived in the U.S. as a stowaway in 1926 and headed for New York.
In Rotterdam, apprenticeship to a progressive design and decorating firm (which encouraged his studies at the academy) had made him sophisticated about contemporary design, but left him ignorant about modern art. That changed in New York, when he saw exhibitions of Matisse, Miró and De Chirico, and had the luck, as De Kooning later said, to meet “the three smartest guys on the scene”—Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky and John Graham, all committed modernists. He dubbed them “the three musketeers” and eagerly signed on as D’Artagnan. Both De Kooning’s academic education and his embrace of vanguard possibilities are documented by exquisitely delicate drawings of his future wife, Elaine Fried, from the early 1940s, and abstract studies with blunt geometric shapes, made in 1937 for a World’s Fair mural commission.
Paintings of seated figures almost dissolving into disembodied but anatomically correct drawing, made between about 1941 and 1946, enlarge this story.
There are high points throughout, such as groups of impressive drawings, punctuated by related signature paintings. Drawings from the mid-1940s with roiling, voluptuous shapes—now almost referential, now abstract—are accompanied by the lush, equivocal “Pink Angels” (c. 1945), essentially a large version of the works on paper, here on canvas. Reversing the sequence, amply scaled black-and-white drawings from 1950-51 explore the implications of “Untitled” (c. 1948-49), an authoritative black painting on paper with full-arm arcs and loops of white line. “Excavation” (1950), the denser, pale descendent of the untitled black painting, continues the conversation.
De Kooning’s refusal to settle for a single approach is attested to by a series of cartoon-like standing figures, repeated by means of transfer techniques, that recalls those earlier efforts at illustration. Contradicting that impulse are abstract drawings constructed with sweeps of black enamel, made during a sojourn in Rome in 1959, and others with accumulations of tremulous lines made in Italy a decade later, inspired by memories of a Breughel painting. Still more different is an opulent pastel, “Untitled (Figures in Landscape)” (1974), with hints of bodies, half-subsumed by vigorous smudges and planes of color.
Perhaps the highest of the high points is the gallery of De Kooning’s notorious images of women, anchored by “Woman I” (1950-52), the buxom, staring, seated figure that caused havoc when the canvas was first exhibited, at a time when only abstraction was deemed serious or desirable. The related drawings surrounding “Woman I” are even fiercer. Urgent, rapid, and unapologetic about reducing females to breasts, bellies and generous thighs, they exist in pencil, oil paint, pastel, and sometimes collaged on smiles clipped from advertisements.
The ferocity waxes and wanes in the works that follow. Tall figures, made in the 1960s, seem to disintegrate as we concentrate on the nuances of De Kooning’s touch. Women grin above folded, minimally indicated bodies. Small bronzes, made in Italy, are like three-dimensional versions of line drawings. Crucifixions with a diagonal Christ startle. So do scribbly, charming drawings of a cat and studies of feet that emphasize grotesqueness. Most enigmatic, perhaps, are large, two-sided, abstract drawings from the 1970s, both used in transferring images to canvas and ends in themselves. All this and a definitive catalog with new research.
Willem de Kooning Drawing
Art Institute of Chicago, through Sept. 20