A Passion for Destruction
MELLOW, JAMES R.
ON ART By James R. Mellow A Passion for Destruction SEVERAL YEARS AGO, an exhibition of "Fifty Years of American Art" brought about a chance confrontation between two modern American painters...
...Maurer's paintings, dating from the '20s to his death, move from comparatively sweet and tender studies of "sisters" or identical-looking girls, to the monstrous distortions of the late paintings where the figures are merged into freakishly abstracted Siamese twins...
...But the pictures succeed without such literal readings...
...There are no stylistic similarities between de Kooning and the earlier painter nor, so far as I know, has de Kooning ever expressed any interest in Maurer's work...
...One was Willem de Kooning, the other Alfred Maurer...
...in its raw emotionalism, it seemed to have gone beyond the limitations of painting...
...On the other hand, despite the common view that de Kooning's women represent savage and devastating attacks upon the ail-American girl, Marilyn Monroe, with its splendid, nearly decorous color and its very knowledgeable style, displayed all the self-control of Art with a capital A. The current de Kooning retrospective establishes the artist as the most significant of the New York School of painters in the '40s, and also suggests a second interesting comparison with Maurer...
...In 1932, he committed suicide for unknown reasons, though discouragement must certainly have been a contributing factor...
...The survey picture was among his most celebrated Abstract Expressionist icons, an imaginary portrait of the cinema goddess Marilyn Monroe, done in 1954, well before the star became the property of Pop Artists...
...A leader and legend of the New York School of painters, de Kooning, now the subject of a very large and important retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, rose to international prominence after World War II...
...Yet with titles like Sub-urb in Havana and Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point, even these carry the suggestion of landscape...
...Greenberg is reported as saying, "It is impossible today to paint a face...
...Judging from some of his fairly recent remarks, too, Greenberg is still undecided on the question of the as-sociational "literary" values that cling to the figure and the enigmatic power that they can bring to a work of art—though he does not express much hope for them in the forsee-able future...
...True, in Dark Pond or Night Square, there are hints of the figurative...
...The retrospective was organized and selected (with the guidance of de Kooning) by Thomas B. Hess, editor of Art News and a long-term friend of the painter...
...The later paintings are a case in point...
...In their way, his most recent efforts recall the violence of Maurer's last works...
...In his catalogue text, Hess includes an interesting exchange between de Kooning and Clement Greenberg, the first and most influential critic to champion the artist's work...
...They are marvelously sustained dialogues between barely inflected line and tenuous masses...
...ON ART By James R. Mellow A Passion for Destruction SEVERAL YEARS AGO, an exhibition of "Fifty Years of American Art" brought about a chance confrontation between two modern American painters of different generations and of markedly different careers who I would never have previously paired together...
...The surprise of the current de Kooning show is the revelation that although Pollock's unorthodox drip style commanded the publicity, de Kooning's black and white abstractions were nonetheless the most masterful achievement of the '40s...
...The illfated Maurer, a first-generation American modernist, spent several years in Paris and then returned to the United States to continue a dismally unrewarded career...
...Indeed, Maurer has been a much-neglected and hardly influential artist...
...De Kooning, with the perverse ambition of an artist, replies, "That's right, and it's impossible not to...
...Greenberg's observation accounts for a good deal more in de Kooning's art—both in his formal successes and critical failures—than, say, the "action-painting" theories of Harold Rosenberg, in which de Kooning's work is seen as an act of gestural freedom, a liberation from the pressures of the European tradition...
...One or two of themoman in a Rowboat and Clam Diggers, for example—display a relaxed manner...
...Greenberg has conceded the formal values of representational painting and explored them often...
...The principal issue, however, is not the resemblance between these painters—although an explanation of the Doppelganger might be psychologically revealing in either case...
...But the careers of both men trace out a progressive disorder in dealing with the favored theme of the female figure...
...From the formal carnage of what was intended to be a Head in a Landscape, two wounded and pitiful female eyes stared back...
...They represent a loose and not very effective episode of abstraction between two periods of figurative work...
...From the earlier pink and tan studies of seated figures to the later, strenuously disjunctive studies of the nude, de Kooning's work has constituted a prolonged formal assault upon the female figure...
...For in his latest paintings de Kooning appears to be bent upon destroying any trace of his own considerable facility as a draftsman and his taste for classical order...
...De Kooning's interest in the Doppelganger began early in drawings like Self-Portrait with Imaginary Brother and recurs continuously in such pictures as Two Men, Mannikins, Two Standing Women, Two Women on a Wharf, and Clam Diggers...
...The impossibility of painting the figure and the face is what de Kooning's art is chiefly about...
...But de Kooning's rage is a calculated and willful effort of style, whereas Maurer, tragically, seems to have been incapable of expressing anything else...
...If one were looking for an example of sheer destructive rage, one had to choose the Maurer...
...Of the two paintings that provided such a revealing contrast, de Kooning's was from his "Woman" series—his brusque, slashing representations of "the idol, the Venus, the nude"—which brought him almost overnight fame when first exhibited in 1953-54...
...By the 1960s," Hess concludes, "he [Greenberg] was engaged in an all-out attack on de Kooning's art, and several of his epigones have followed his lead, apparently unencumbered by any knowledge of their leader's old convictions...
...Moreover, they both share a curious preoccupation with the double-portrait or double figure...
...De Kooning reverted to more independent abstractions in the later '50s, when his painting becomes broader and somewhat Klinish in structure...
...Maurer's painting was one of those troublesome late pictures that give you the impression of an artist going out of control, twisting and mangling the subject almost beyond recognition...
...The female form has been subjected to various depredations: splayed out in Mercator projections as a kind of landscape, or pieced out into fleshy breasts and thighs as if it were a still life...
...The exhibition—now midway in its travels from Amsterdam and London to Chicago and Los Angeles—is the most comprehensive de Kooning collection ever assembled, including Marilyn Monroe and 146 other drawings and paintings...
...Like the Museum of Modern Art's large Jackson Pollock retrospective two years ago, the current de Kooning retrospective makes very clear how obsessively haunting the whole representational question remained for the leaders of a movement that had supposedly broken completely free of the tradition of Europe and the claims of subject matter...
...The exchange, and the accompanying reprint of Greenberg's earlier appreciations of de Kooning's "Woman" paintings, are useful, though not for Hess' apparent motive: as a stick to beat the critic and his "formalist" followers...
...Hess has also provided a detailed and informative monograph on the artist, tracing out the complex development of a career that is marked by bouts of figurative work alternating with periods of abstraction and semi-abstraction...
...Just for a brief period—the late '40s and early '50s—did both artists establish their independence from representational elements successfully: Pollock with his mural-sized drip paintings, and de Kooning with a quite magnificent series of black and white abstractions...
...Pollock, too, after the decorative extravagance of the big drip paintings, went back to represention in a series of large black and white calligraphic works...
...Ranging from the early abstractions of the mid-'30s to the wildly disordered figure paintings of 1967, many have never been shown publicly before...
...In most cases, though, the definition of the figure is overstrained, combining ribaldry with the grossest caricature, and bringing to mind Maurer's terminal oeuvre...
...Rather, it is the constant and nagging figurative problem, to which we are alerted by the similarity, lying beneath the surface of de Kooning's work...
...The color is sumptuous?blonde and rosy—suggesting everywhere that funny but apt-sounding word, pulchritude...
...Perhaps it is only now, when the controversies surrounding the Abstract Expressionist School have cooled a little and a new generation of artists has moved with more sustained confidence into total abstraction, that we can look back and see how both Pollock and de Kooning were tied to the figure...
...Partly, one infers these from the likenesses of the forms to other, more clearly representational, studies...
...Where it succeeds, figuratively or abstractly, it does so by extending older conventions of pictorial structure, not by acts of gestural abandon...
...No one, among the painters of his generation and school, has tackled the problem of the figure more persistently and, on occasion, more successfully...
Vol. 52 • March 1969 • No. 6
