Different strokes: the late work of Willem de Kooning

ArtForum, Jan, 1997 by Peter Schjeldahl

Intermittently in 1981-82 and completely thereafter, de Kooning lost his stroke. It had been his hallmark contribution to the art of painting: an arm motion that unclenched one of the most concentratedly intelligent marks ever seen. The stroke could deliver at once line, shape, color, contour, depth, touch, rhythm, and, crucially, scale. Not to be at sea in a pre-1980s de Kooning, requires that you grasp the muscular eloquence, both fierce and delicate, of that visible exertion, which communicates between the artist's body and your own. In many of his effusions of the 1970s, it's as if he were holding you by the hand as all hell breaks loose around you. Actually, there is plenty of compositional rigor in even the most rip-roaring de Kooning, and it is this rigor that stands forth, nakedly at play, toward the end.

Ceasing to do his stroke, de Kooning commenced to render it. Big directional shapes that used to be created in one dashing go are made of additive, small strokes or are edited from underlayers with masking strokes of white (somewhat like Arshile Gorky circa 1940). Some dragged swaths made with a wide, loaded brush stop suddenly, sliced off in space to breathtaking, racy effect. Undulating strands like ribbons in a wind are bodiless. Their often feathered textures have a whizzing quality, a sizzle of speed, without kinetic grab. The strands get where they are going as if by the remote control of an impersonal will that is uncannily alert to the compositional needs of a particular picture. De Kooning seems less to make than to conjure painting from an incomprehensibly rich lode of memory, reached through forgetfulness.

Late de Kooning trades in symbol for sign. Its elements sacrifice emotional resonance and gain declarative purity as sheer signifiers, unreferential despite occasionally cartoonish graphic whims. (As always, Women come and go.) From having been "episodes of painting," in Storr's phrase, de Kooning's works become episodes of picturemaking. They are about spending funds of drawing, texture, and color at the behest of an imagination that, allergic to anything already known, must refresh itself constantly to stay alive. In this, though little else, de Kooning's late work recalls the oft-cited cutouts of Henri Matisse. The self-affirming deployment of their gifts took consuming, jealous precedence for both old painters. Late Matisse bequeathed subsequent artists a new, bedrock model of pictorial aesthetics. Late de Kooning will prove to have done the same, differently.

Looking at late de Kooning entails an awkward adjustment to new things: new for him and new, period. At first, their affectless air may discourage. They do not catch us up. But stick around, concentrating on what's there and on the phenomenal intelligence that governs its unfolding. (Complicating one's effort is the variety of the work, which keeps shifting gears from picture to picture and beggars cumulative analysis. I recommend a dose of two or three paintings per really attentive viewing.) What's there may approach perfection as closely as human performance can. Tension does not disappear with the fading of de Kooning's anxiety. It is transferred to the vicarious determination of each formal element to be emphatic, harmonious, and interesting.