[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: December 22, 2011]
I finally took myself off to the predicatbly rewarding Willem De Kooning retrospective at MoMA. Massive in scale, more or less orderly in layout, it's the one DeKooning show you'll need to see.
Although many of the paintings are familiar from the continuous barrage of abstract expressionist shows we've enjoyed in New York over the past ten years, seeing them hung together makes a difference.
And one difference it makes in particular is to show DeKooning even less of an abstract expressionist than is popularly supposed. Of course, the awkwardness here is that there is no formal qualification for that epithet, coined as it was - in this context - by Robert Coates in a 1946 New Yorker articles. The abstract expressionists were a coherent group of friends rather than a coherent group of artists, as David Sylvester's 1960 interview with David Smith makes clear.
Many of them emerged from the WPA Art Project to drink and talk in a huddle of bars - the Cedar Tavern, the San Remo, the Lion's Head - in New York, sharing an embattled sense of destiny as the first artists trying to do something uniquely American. In fact, they were doing a bunch of different things, and it's surely the social cohesion of the movement which persuades us to associate Gorky's magical marks with Gottlieb's myth-making, Kline's frenzied black on white marks with Newman's ruthless formalism.
Certainly, there are family resemblances, but if any of the major AbEx's stands out from the crowd, it's surely DeKooning, who has emerged as one of the great figure painters of the twentieth century. Abstraction, for DeKooning, is a late discipline rather than an originary concern.
The MoMA show opens charmingly with some conventional still lives he painted in his teens. Immediately on arrival in the States, it seems that the background for these works ceases to be simply representational and takes on the decorative, schematic role seen in still lives by Matisse. Soon after, in early nudes, the distinctive color palette is seen: pinks, beiges and blues. Before you know it, you're plunged into the remarkable series of Women.
DeKooning, in the most productive part of his career, wrestled with the human body and human flesh. Pure abstraction, of the kind practised - in such different ways - by Pollock, Still and Newman, could not be further from his practice. I've never been sure - still aren't - quite what to make of these gargantuan (yes, Rabelaisian) depictions of the feminine form, at once garish, hideous, hilarious, but that the feminine form is his central concern can hardly be disputed. There's always great pleasure to be derived, though, from his paint handling: the rich, lush strokes which from a distance seem to express a single tone, but which on close inspection reveal a constellation of colors.
The figure seems to be absent from later works - although it seems he claimed that he usually began with a figure and painted over it. Paint - oil and enamel - seems to be the main subject of the lovely late '40s works, including just one - "Excavation" - which is painted all over, has no visual focus, and uniquely reminded me of Pollock.
It's a vast exhibition and I need to re-visit. Fortunately, MoMA is giving us through January 9.
David Smith, "Cubes and Anarchy" at the Whitney
It's hard to imagine there's much new to see from David Smith following the 2006 Guggenheim centennial and his regular featured appearance as the token sculptor in any AbEx shows. A selective approach, as at the current Whitney show, is therefore refreshing - even if the curatorial motive is a head-scratcher.
The intention is to provide a "fresh look" at the importance of geometric form throughout Smith's practice, on the pretext that his "late" monumental sculptures (the totems, in other words) have been wrongly seen as a radical departure from his earlier "surrealist" and "expressionist" tendencies. Read all about it. Well...shrug.
One problem with this strategy is classing some of his work as "late." The concept of "late works" has some baggage, relating most obviously to a sense of mortality and impending death. It's perfectly reasonable, for example, to say that we are now reading John Ashbery's late poems. But David Smith was unexpectedly killed in a car accident, aged 59 and in full flood of creativity. We are deprived of his late works.
Also, despite the show's title, we don't really have anything to do with cubes or anarchism here, except there are some rectangular solids in some of the pieces. There's some curatorial waffle about cubism and Smith's liberal politics, but "Cubes and Anarchy"? Really?
Having said all that, the sculptures in the show are well worth seeing. The small scale of the show allows appreciation of what I'd agree are less characteristic pieces from the late Cubi series. "Cubi I" (1963) is a tall, free-standing, stainless steel piece which seems to toss boxes carelessly in the air, like flipping a pack of cards. The poised, sprightly lightness of a heavy, solid form seems to me typical of all Smith's work. And always a joy.
Through January 8.
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