Willem de Kooning in Amsterdam: Wanderer between abstraction and figure

Willem de Kooning has just returned home to the Rijks, the magnificent National Museum of the Netherlands. Posthumously, of course, as he died in New York in 1997: very old, very sick. And very famous. His paintings have brought immense sums to the art market so far: "Interchange" (railroad crossing), for example, was sold for 300 million US dollars in 2015. Others are firmly in renowned private collections in the USA. The main works are unsellable, belonging to the MoMA, the Guggenheim or the Whitney Museum New York, the Centre Pompidou Paris, the National Gallery Australia, the Stedelijk Amsterdam or the Museum Ludwig Cologne. Only one large exhibition in Germany So far there has been only one large De Kooning exhibition in Germany. The Kunstmuseum Bonn showed something of the late work in 1996, so to speak, at the end of the pole. But for the general understanding of the retrospective, there was a lack of reference to the life's work with the restless shift between abstract and figurative. And in Berlin, some drawings from the Burda collection were shown in the DB Kunsthalle in 2014. The native Rotterdammer, son of a beverage dealer, was back in his old homeland for a short time almost 30 years before his death. On a photo, he stands in front of the Stedelijk and laughs at the camera. An attractive male image, truly. Inside were his paintings. Willem de Kooning was a key figure from the New York School around the Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko. But he never gave up on the figure. Especially not the female one. He resisted classifying it entirely as "abstract painting". In the circle of the "Dripping-Gotts," Pollock, this was "high treason". Willem de Kooning's "Woman I", 1950–1952, Oil, Scandal Picture No. 2 © The Museum of Modern Art/The Willem de Kooning Foundation "Pure abstraction" was considered the ultimate avant-garde at that time. The trend swept across Western Europe and almost mutated into dogma. The most influential American art critic Clement Greenberg preached the renunciation of any figuration. When De Kooning suddenly began painting water-amazonian female images again, this was considered reactionary. Insulted as a reactionary, drunkard, and sexist Furthermore, the painter was branded by feminists as a "drunkard," "sexist," and even a "hater of women." He would reduce women to vulgar, threatening sex objects, glorify machismo. It was no use that he objected, he celebrated femininity and wanted to "break the pathos of art history". At that time, De Kooning traveled from Amsterdam to Italy, where in the Venice Biennale, as in 1950 with the iconic "Excavation" and in 1954 with other gestural-expressive female images and figurative collages, he was exhibited. He was in the land where the lemons bloom twice in a row. There he found peace, he later said, back in N.Y. He probably found some distance, from the excessive indulgence in whisky and brandy, from the demonic doubts, from the up and down between abstraction and intensely erotic figures, these two souls, ah, in his chest. His career began adventurously: in 1926, at the age of 22, he landed as a blind passenger on a ship from Rotterdam across the Atlantic in New York, succeeding as an illustrator and window designer. Despite the often precarious outcome, he led an excessive life: painting, drawing, alcohol, women. Willem de Kooning: "Black and White Abstraction", 1950-51, Enamel on Linen Paper © Collection Jasper Johns/The Willem de Kooning Foundation Part of the time he painted, full of self-doubt, around individual canvases for months. It took him almost two years from 1950 to 1952 for "Woman I". The quality of painting alternated with phases of ecstatic happiness. Later, from the mid-1970s, as in Trance, he created in giant formats: crude, jet-black and brightly colored body drawings and delirious, mask-like (female) figures. These paintings now gathered in the Rijks are as wonderful as disturbing figural signs of a driven being. Painting that comes from drawing In the USA, De Kooning's painting derived from drawing is long considered iconic. In Europe, however, the great blonde from Rotterdam, born in 1904, is only just being discovered. In Amsterdam, his life's work is now spread across ten halls, showing "Willem de Kooning at Work". And it grants him the highest honor at the top of the "Most Holy" – in the altarpieces of the great painters of the "Golden Age," immediately before access to Rembrandt's "Night Watch," where restorers work behind glass. Willem de Kooning: "Queen of Hearts", 1943-1946, Oil and Charcoal on Hardboard © Gift Hirshhorn Museum/Lee Stalsworth/The Willem de Kooning Foundation There, painted in brushstrokes and charcoal lines, are the aforementioned wild "Woman I" (1950/52) and "Woman and Bicycle" (1952/53): giants with staring eyes, mask-like squinted teeth, and powerful breasts. The first painted the Valkyrie breasts metallically like a knight's armor. The second stroked (symbolically) blue, red, yellow, the primary colors of Mondrian and Newman, onto the facade. European painters inspired even in the GDR Room by room one experiences that De Kooning's idiosyncratic visual language has not lost anything of its breathtaking freedom, and how much this stylistics leaves traces in European painting: first in the West in the pictures of the Cobra group around Asger Jorn, Constant, Karel Appel, Georg Baselitz, and around 1980 with the "New Wild Ones" around Rainer Fetting, Elvira Bach and Salomé in West Berlin. Also in the eighties in the East, in the "Young Wild Ones" of the Leipzig School around Heisig and in Dresden workshops. Since it was always figurative, the party dogmatists had to tolerate it with clenched teeth. Willem de Kooning's painting lives on the (intense) unacademic drawing; it was a means for exploration. This process was fundamental for him: "I have to change to remain the same," he said. Therefore, his art never stagnated, despite all the hostility. Willem de Kooning: "Untitled", 1966, Charcoal on Paper © Gift Jan Christiaan Braun in honor of Rudi Fuchs/The Museum of Modern Art/The Willem de Kooning Foundation One walks constantly through the ten halls in the Rijks through creatively mastered contradictions between abstraction and corporeality, between intense force and tenderness, between supposed repetition and a new conception of form, color, body. Especially the period from 1960 to 1980 is exciting. De Kooning, long a fixed figure in the art world, withdrew from the New York big city life at that time, including the months in Italy. He chose the refuge on Long Island with his wife Elaine (she died in 1989). The retreat into nature (the hype around Pop Art also annoyed him) initially led to abstract, light-filled, color-radiating landscape paintings and soon to moving, erotic figure studies, where female bodies emerge and disappear from pools of color and line convulsions. Nature and body become one. This can also be understood in the bronze, which grows and interpenetrates, in the exercises. View of the Rijks hall with the painter's color-and-form-reduced epilogue, his last painting at the very back © Rijksmuseum/The Willem de Kooning Foundation And then one comes to a quiet, bright room. Here the curator Marian Cousijn has subtly gathered the last paintings. On them, the rough, wilderness, orgiastic wildness of the earlier motifs is lost. Now the forms in a muted palette are more fluid, more harmonious. The moving line in gray, blue, black over the calm white ground appears light and unburdened: somehow very far from the noise, the hustle, the aches and laments of the world. One senses how the Alzheimer's disease made this former energy package Willem de Kooning fade away. The only sketch-like, reduced brushstrokes can be read as passing life lines. Perhaps they were still very distant memories of female bodies, of landscapes. Or, very vaguely, of the masterly Dutch vanitas motifs. As a cheerful reconciliation with transience, all earthly things. Willem de Kooning at Work. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Museumsstraat 1, until January 17, 2027, Mon–Sat, 9–5 o'clock. Cooperation with the Art Institute Chicago and the Willem de Kooning Foundation N.Y. Catalog 30 Euros Your opinion is important to us. Send us your feedback on this article to: briefe@berliner-zeitung.de