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A Tribute for a Washington Painter by Way of Holland
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Have you ever noticed how many Phillips paintings -- Edouard Vuillard's, Pierre Bonnard's, Henri Matisse's, Richard Diebenkorn's -- show views through open windows? De Looper's rectangles, which open into colored space, will remind you of those windows. And not only of windows. Recollections of other Phillips pictures, Sean Scully's, for example, or Giorgio Morandi's, flicker in the show.
Looking at Willem de Looper's paintings, I kept remembering another Dutchman, Willem de Kooning. It isn't just their Christian names -- the two painters share more than that.
Both hungered for America, its newness and its hipness. Both fell hard for jazz -- not Dixieland, but music more open and abstract: Parker, Coltrane, Monk. And both of them retain hints of traditional depiction (of figures in de Kooning's case, of landscapes in de Looper's) even in their most abstract works of art.
Their differences matter, too. De Kooning's mother ruled a tough dockside bar in Rotterdam, whose violence, noise and rawness are all in his restless art. It's easy to imagine what he saw there. ("A slipping glimpser" is what he called himself.)
De Looper was born in the Hague in 1932, not in a dive. His mother was respectably related to Johan H. Huizinga, the great Dutch medievalist, and his father worked in a bank. De Looper went to AU to study serious subjects (business, economics), became a serious scholar and held a serious job. There is chance-taking in his pictures, and humor, and free improvisation, but it never gets out of hand. The man's a solid citizen. Stability is often tweaked, but never overthrown, in his firmly grounded art.
De Kooning, who jumped ship in Hoboken in 1926, was a bohemian: He drank too much, womanized and lived, until his riches came, in dank cold-water flats. Today few names are bigger in art than de Kooning's. He was an international art star, and a market king, and a giant.
De Looper isn't a giant. Holland is a little place, as is Washington. He didn't have to be a giant in an art world as small as this one, where he planted his good career.
It's great to see a Washington museum -- this one -- systematically exploring the art history of the city. Credit for the program goes mostly to Jack Rasmussen, its director and curator, who organized the "Willem de Looper" show.
