Willem de Kooning from the Hirshhorn Museum Collection. - book reviews

The 1993-94 exhibition season in Washington, D.C., featured two major exhibitions of the work of Willem de Kooning, organized, respectively, by the Hirshhorn Museum and the National Gallery of Art to mark the painter's ninetieth birthday. After a career that spanned almost six decades, de Kooning, reportedly suffering from Alzheimer's disease, stopped painting around 1990. Thus, the ninetieth anniversary of his birth offered the perfect opportunity to review and assess his life's work in a full-scale retrospective. Neither the Hirshhorn nor the National Gallery was able to take advantage of this opportunity, however. The National Gallery is prevented by its charter from presenting retrospectives of living artists, so the organizers of its show--English critic David Sylvester, Tate Gallery director Nicholas Serota, and National Gallery curator Maria Prather--opted to focus exclusively on de Kooning's paintings of the period 1938-86, excluding his drawings, sculptures, and prints, his earliest abstract canvases, and his very last paintings, executed after 1986. Hirshhorn curator Judith Zilczer drew her show exclusively from the Hirshhorn's own collection of de Kooning's paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints--the most extensive in a public institution but still not comprehensive, lacking any canvases from the second half of the 1950s, when de Kooning produced his boldest "action paintings," or from 1975-79, when the artist painted the dense and colorful abstract canvases increasingly recognized as among his best pictures.

Zilczer chose to display fifty-two de Koonings from the Hirshhorn museum's seventy-one.(1) Except for the last two canvases in the exhibition, the large abstract paintings Untitled III (1981) and Untitled (1985; fig. 3), all the pieces on view were acquired by museum founder Joseph H. Hirshhorn. Despite Zilczer's admirable attempt to mold the Hirshhorn collection into a survey of de Kooning's career, the show ultimately revealed less about de Kooning's personal artistic development than it did about Hirshhorn's particular taste in de Kooning. While the collector did not entirely neglect de Kooning's abstract works--he bought the small black-and-white enamel abstraction Zurich (1947), the expansive Untitled (May 1962), and several minor abstract works on paper--he responded most warmly to de Kooning's prolonged engagement with the human figure. Many of the most important works that Hirshhorn acquired represent the anonymous, universal woman who animated de Kooning's aesthetic quest for over thirty years, appearing first in a Picassoid incarnation in Queen of Hearts (1943-46); next in explosively painterly manifestations such as Woman (1948;fig. 1) and Two Women in the Country (1954); later in juicy oils like Two Standing Women (1963-64) and Woman, Sag Harbor (1964); and finally in succulent bronze sculptures such as Seated Woman on a Bench (1972).

Female and, occasionally, male figures were also the subject of another twenty or so oil studies and charcoal drawings, several of the latter inscribed affectionately "to Joe, from Bill, with love." The inscriptions evince the close friendship that Hirshhorn and de Kooning enjoyed during the 1960s, as do the warm letters between de Kooning and Joseph and Olga Hirshhorn published in the exhibition catalogue. The catalogue also reveals that Joseph Hirshhorn's patronage of de Kooning extended beyond the mere purchase of his works to include direct financial support, in 1964, for the construction and landscaping expenses of de Kooning's new studio in Springs, Long Island.

The National Gallery's de Kooning exhibition, which included three pictures from the Hirshhorn (Woman, Two Women in the Country, and Woman, Sag Harbor) and seventy-three from other public and private collections, offered the most complete and well-chosen survey of de Kooning's paintings since his first major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1969. For the most part, the National Gallery hung de Kooning's paintings chronologically, demonstrating the development of his art over almost five decades, and offering the chance to explore, through well-coordinated groupings of related works, each distinct stage in his careen Omitting de Kooning's earliest abstract paintings from the late 1930s and early 1940s, the National Gallery installation commenced with the early figurative paintings of men and women (ca. 1938-44) and then moved on to the black-and-white and color abstractions (1946-50); the second and third series of Women (1948-50 and 1950-55); the urban abstractions (1955-56); the parkway landscapes (1957-60); the pastoral abstractions (1963); the Springs-period figurative paintings (1963-71); the painterly abstractions of the 1970s (1975-78); and the late linear abstractions (1981-86). Each of these phases of de Kooning's oeuvre was represented by several major works. The only key painting missing from the National Gallery show was Pink Angels (ca. 1945, Frederick Wetsman Company, Los Angeles), de Kooning's finest effort in the mode of automatist biomorphism and a crucial bridge between his figure paintings of the early 1940s and his later black-and-white abstractions.