DE KOONING: An American Master
By Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan
Knopf. 732 pp. $35
De Kooning with his work-in-progress "Woman I" in 1952
(Kay Bell Reynal)
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If New York City were more committed to marking its important historic sites than to wiping them out with a wrecker's ball, one might find a bronze plaque today on an old loft building at 85 Fourth Avenue instead of its squat yellow brick replacement. It was at that address, one flight up, that Willem de Kooning, an illegal immigrant from the Netherlands who had arrived in the United States as a stowaway in 1926, lived and painted in relative obscurity from 1947-52 in a studio that bore little similarity to the artists' lofts depicted in our time in Architectural Digest. "The back resembled a cave and was illuminated only by naked light bulbs dangling from overhead," write Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan in their vivid, compelling biography of this 20th-century master. To heat his loft, the artist, when he could afford to, would "lug five-gallon cans of kerosene upstairs."
Bitterly separated from his wife, Elaine, and refusing to support himself any longer with commercial art, de Kooning was so abjectly broke that a friend remembered him subsisting at times on ketchup cadged from the Automat. As he destroyed one painting after another in a relentless search for his own identity, de Kooning, as his biographers portray him, often felt paralyzed with despair. Yet within this bleak period came the "landmark years," 1947-48, when, temporarily abandoning the figure and suddenly achieving a brilliant fusion of cubism and surrealism, he painted a series of black and white abstractions -- most of them executed with cheap enamel house paint -- that would become icons of the New York School and are still regarded by some critics as his greatest achievements.
One of the virtues of this outstanding biography is its authors' healthy respect for the mysteries of the creative process. Reflecting upon de Kooning's breakthrough, they judiciously observe, "No outsider can follow the winding, internal path that leads a man like de Kooning from despair to discovery, but the sensation of hitting bottom can sometimes stimulate an artist to abandon old commitments, embrace new ideas, and, finally, confront what must be said or acknowledged." They also never lose sight of the evolving New York art world in the first half of the 20th century. In 1948, the "profane, 'damn the consequences' outlook" of the postwar artists, exemplified most strikingly by the liberating drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, inspired de Kooning to make the brushstroke "the mark of the knotty, inescapable self." Pollock was a rising star by then, but de Kooning's first one-man show of 10 black-and-white canvases that year attracted no public attention and did not improve his circumstances. Among downtown artists, however, it generated enormous excitement and won him an accolade in the Nation from the influential critic Clement Greenberg, who wondered why he had never heard of de Kooning: "He has saved one the trouble of repeating 'promising.' "
Back then, the downtown art world was still small and intimate. Most of the artists had known one another for nearly two decades. Together they had survived the Depression, when they were rescued from destitution by the WPA, as well as the even more difficult wartime period when public interest in the famous surrealists who had emigrated from Europe effectively cut off most support for American art. They visited one another's studios, lent one another money, sat up all night long in the dingy precincts of the Waldorf Cafeteria or the Cedar Bar discussing the ground-breaking work they had little hope of selling or showing. De Kooning was sustained by his friendships; his circle included Arshile Gorky, his most important mentor; the abstract expressionist Franz Kline; and the art critic Harold Rosenberg. Once on a park bench in Washington Square, he encountered a newcomer who introduced himself as Mark Rothko. The close-knit group took the place of family for de Kooning, who had grown up in a fatherless household in Rotterdam with a desperate and abusive mother and was too absorbed in his work and too ambivalent about women to sustain intimate relationships with them. He proved to be a late bloomer. Yet despite the hardships of his years of obscurity, de Kooning's long isolation from the public eye, combined with the encouragement and the stimulating flow of ideas he found among his peers, may have provided him with the perfect conditions in which to develop into a fullblown master by his mid-forties.
With the rise of mass media in the early 1950s, there was a profound change in American culture that caught artists of de Kooning's generation unprepared. It was as if the existential "tough-guy" image of a Jackson Pollock, promulgated far and wide by Life magazine in the summer of 1949, could become a commodity almost more valuable than the work itself. And if Pollock was labeled as the "Greatest Living Painter in the United States," where did that leave de Kooning and everyone else? As fame overtook de Kooning, he responded to the disorienting pressures it brought by starting to drink heavily and to compulsively womanize and by the risky act of asserting his artistic independence. With abstract expressionism the reigning mode in American avant garde art, he returned to the figure in a ferocious series of "Women" paintings that confounded former supporters. By 1962, as the rich and the fashionable increasingly showed up at gallery openings and invaded de Kooning's old haunts and as a new generation of artists took up pop art and minimalism, he turned his back on New York and retreated to Long Island. He started building a studio for himself in Springs, across the road from the cemetery where Jackson Pollock was buried.
The last 35 years of Willem de Kooning's life are a sad and chaotic yet heroic story, told by Stevens and Swan with unfailing compassion. His loneliness was acute, his binges catastrophic, his relationships with the several women in his life reflections of his instability, rage and confusion.
Yet he lived to paint and continued to reinvent and redefine himself as an artist. When he succumbed to Alzheimer's, assistants had to lay out the paints, but the unique connection between his eye and his hand was left to him. His last work was a dot in the middle of the canvas, surrounded by concentric circles of bright color. •
Joyce Johnson's books include the memoirs "Minor Characters" and the recently published "Missing Men."
