Give a broad critical appraisal of the work of Willem de Kooning

The American Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) was born in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. He was raised by a domineering mother who worked as a bartender. De Kooning was unusual among the Abstract Expressionists in that he remained loyal to a figurative style. He focused on depicting women throughout his artistic career, conveying controversial images of women as grotesque and threatening. He was described as a ‘highly emotional’ character, deeply affected by his ‘not very loving’ mother (Lee Hall). He was an academically trained artist, studying at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts, the Brussels Academie Royals des Beaux-Arts and the Antwerp Schelling School of Design. At age twenty-two de Kooning emigrated to New York illegally. He began to paint alongside other American Abstract Expressionists, namely Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), Arshile Gorky (1904-1948) and Mark Rothko (1903-1970). All were at the forefront of new innovations in painting, for example the techniques of action painting and gestural painting, and were influenced by European Modernist movements like Surrealism and Cubism, as well as the Mexican Muralists and Native American sand-painting. These five Abstract Expressionist artists painted at a time during which America was developing significantly. Modernism had evolved in Paris, from the Impressionist movement of the 1870s until the Surrealist movement of the 1930s. However, with discreet CIA help, New York then replaced France as the world’s artistic centre. The Great Depression of 1929 crippled America. Its economy was severely damaged and unemployment soared. Relief, ironically, came in the form of the Second World War. America’s hegemony suddenly multiplied after manufacturing arms to sell to countries fighting against Nazi Germany, after a period of American ‘isolationism’ ended by Pearl Harbour (1945). After the economic success of the Second World War, America became embroiled in the nuclear-driven conflicts of the decades-lasting Cold War. The world was divided into two political ideologies; the capitalist West, and the communist East. People became wary of the destruction at the fingertips of the two superpowers, Russia and the US, after the 1945 and 1946 bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Due to this sudden rise in wealth and power, the United States developed from being ‘backwards’ artistically to being at the forefront of Modernism. The modern art collections of wealthy patrons such as Peggy Guggenheim started to rival those in Europe. However, de Kooning was unable to benefit from relief projects like the Works Progress Administration, due to his illegal immigrant status. Previously, American artists like Thomas Hart-Benton (1899-1975) had taken decades to respond to the art of European Modernists such as Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), but in 1934 the American artist Arshile Gorky (1904-1948) wrote, ‘if Picasso drips, I drip’. In 1929 The Museum of Modern Art was founded and by 1940 many avant-garde artists, for example Salvador Dali (1904-1989) and Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), had emigrated to New York.De Kooning’s early depictions of women were highly influenced by European artists, evident in his Seated Woman (1940). The distortion of space and manipulation of figure seems to be a direct response to the Cubist Picasso’s Marie-Therese Walker(1937). Both women are in a similar seated pose, and both figures are fragmented, almost like broken dolls. Another European modernist who influenced Seated Woman is the Post-Impressionist Paul Cezanne (1839-1906). The background space has been compressed and the table is sloping, much like in Cezanne’s Still Life with Plaster Cupid (1895). Furthermore, the arbitrary, bright colours of Seated Woman seem to have been influenced by the Fauvist palette used in works by Henri Matisse (1869-1954), such as Roofs at Collioure (1905). InSeated Woman the technique of pentimenti, alterations in a painting evidenced by traces of previous work, is also used. The right side of the woman’s face is smudged and painted over. This technique was practiced by the Impressionist Edgar Degas (1834-1917) in his painting Young Spartans Exercising (1860). Her face is vaguely painted, as if her identity is uncertain. The critic Robert Hughes inaccurately stated that de Kooning’s depictions of women were influenced by ‘anonymous’ magazine models. Given de Kooning’s own difficult history with women – he was raised by an unkind mother and married to the domineering Elaine Fried – it is more believable that the women he is painting are based on the intimidating women in his own life. Unlike the editors of magazines airbrushing models, he has not idolised Seated Woman but has depicted her as disconnected and unresolved. De Kooning’s following portrayal of women, Woman (1944), is even more disjointed. The woman’s body refuses to cohere. She has a disturbing, fixed gaze, her hand almost claw-like. Once again, the influence of Matisse is evident when comparing Woman to his The Green Stripe (1905). Both faces are primitive and mask-like, and the colour palettes are bright and luminous. The elongated, exaggerated figure can also be seen to have been influenced by the Neoclassical Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ (1780-1867) Madame Jacques Louis Le Blanc (1823). De Kooning was exposed to Ingres during his frequent visits to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The woman has a similar fixed gaze and pose, and an elongated sweep from nose to shoulder. De Kooning has transformed Ingres’ idealised depiction of a woman into something grotesque and crazed, changing the palette from silvery creams and blacks to nauseating greens and oranges. In the same year, the artist John Graham (1881-1961) painted Celia, a depiction of a woman which seems to fit between the two depictions. It is of a gentler palette, but the broad shoulders and frontal pose are the same. In Woman de Kooning is depicting women as repulsive creatures. They are manifestations of the controlling, domineering women in his life which plagued his ‘subconscious hell’ (de Kooning in an interview with Seldon Rodman). De Kooning continues to express his subconscious during his short black and white abstracted phase, with paintings such as Attic (1949) and Excavation (1950). Like his images of women, there is a great deal of fragmentation and dislocation. In both paintings, there seems to be a mass of black and white female body parts, perpetuating the belief that de Kooning objectified women. There are illusions to vagina dentate, asserting the idea that de Kooning’s subconscious was preoccupied with a fear of emasculation; it ‘is a mental map’ (Jonathan Fineberg) of de Kooning’s unconscious.De Kooning’sTwo Standing Women (1949) presents the viewer with two powerful and commanding women. They are aggressively painted, sexually provocative, and are displaying themselves like prostitutes. The painting can be closely compared to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Both depict prostitutes posturing to an unseen customer. Both are drawn with thick black outlines, disjointed and mask-like. Robert Hughes compares Two Standing Women to Chaim Soutine’s (1893-1943) Carcass of Beef(1925). He accurately notes that ‘the bodies splayed […] pay […] explicit homage to Soutine’s handing ox carcass’. De Kooning’s women are hung like meat in a butcher’s window. On the surface, it may seem that de Kooning is a misogynist. However, de Kooning’s view of women is more complicated than that. He found women ‘vociferous and ferocious’, and saw them as threatening. Far from objectifying them, he is depicting how their intimidating characters manifest themselves physically.De Kooning’s final depiction of women is Woman I (1950-52). The woman he has painted seems to be a culmination of all his earlier figures; she is grotesque, snarling, masculine and holding the power of the gaze. It is influenced and informed by a variety of previous works of art. The voluptuous, broad body is similar to that of the Venus of Willendorf sculpture (circa 30000-25000 BC), a handheld fertility goddess, carved by a Nomadic tribe along the Rhine. The physical bulk of Jean Debuffet’s (1901-1985) Woman may also have informed de Kooning, as he viewed it at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1951. The painting displays the female form like the skin of a flayed animal, as if a huntsman’s trophy. It portrays male predatory attitudes towards women, which de Kooning contrasts with his own dominating and commandeering women. He is painting an extreme version of the femme fatale; a ‘Doris Day with shark teeth’ (Robert Hughes). He is exploring the intimidations of a beautiful and successful woman, like the actress Doris Day. Out of all his depictions of women, Woman I is the painting which most aptly conveys the belief that de Kooning used his wife and mother as an inspiration. Hans Namuth photographed de Kooning and his wife, Elaine, next to the painting. Despite her petite figure, her pose and gaze are remarkably similar to the monstrous woman. Elaine remarked that ‘I and the painted lady seemed like…mother and daughter’. De Kooning has depicted his wife in such a violent way because of the intimidating, powerful hold she had over him. De Kooning’s work focuses on monstrous manifestations of the women he personally and intimately encountered throughout his life. He remarked to Harold Rosenberg that his depictions of women ‘reminded [him] of water’; water being an archetypal image of the subconscious. Rather like Pollock, de Kooning is painting his deepest and darkest subconscious fears, specifically of women. He is not misogynistic. He is expressing his terror of the femme fatale. Jonathan Finberg brilliantly summed up de Kooning’s work by writing that ‘intimations of Elaine provided a starting point for these paintings, then feelings about the artist’s mother […] and the pretty pin ups on his studio wall all entered the complex sequence of thoughts that led gradually to the final composition’. His women are painted viciously and aggressively to expose the femme fatale, and in doing so, he ‘had come up with one of the most memorable images of sexual insecurity in American culture’ (Robert Hughes). De Kooning’s work was highly unique, however one could say that he went on to influence Lucian Freud’s (1922-2011) un-idealised, sometimes repulsive, nudes.