De Kooning: The Kick, the Twist, the Woman, the Rowboat

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Notes

1. Willem de Kooning, ‘What Abstract Art Means to Me’, The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, 18 (Spring 1951): 5.

2. Willem de Kooning, quoted in Charlotte Willard, ‘De Kooning’, Look, 27 May 1969, 58. A point of methodology: when focusing on an individual artist, I tend to avoid invoking comparative figures, or do so only sparingly; I also avoid art-historical categories. With the exception of the small number of scholars who have devoted research to de Kooning separately from his New York School contemporaries, art historians assume that this painter was an abstract expressionist (he would have objected) and, furthermore, that all abstract expressionists were ‘modernist’ in the prevailing art-historical sense (a reductive version of the later Clement Greenberg’s position on the evolution of modern art and its cultural values). Given this dual precondition, any deviation from analysis in line with the modernist syndrome, whether pro or con, becomes questionable, even incoherent, for two discursive screens have already been placed between acts of viewing and the material objects that de Kooning produced. I do not suggest that aesthetic appreciation arrives independently of context, but rather that context itself can be reinvented and need not come ready-made as a ‘modernism’ we think we already know. The discursive screens of abstract expressionism and modernism may be useful when dealing with questions of critical reception, but not when the concern is modes of physicality. If de Kooning were provided with a definition of what the majority of art historians now regard as a ‘modernist’ artist, I believe he would reply: ‘Well, I guess I’m not one of those guys’. For an extended discussion of de Kooning and the pitfalls of a generalised ‘modernism’, see my Doubt (New York: Routledge, 2008) and Between Sense and de Kooning (London: Reaktion, 2011). For a related discussion of modern art and its play of interference between image (or thematics) and materiality, see my essays: ‘Breath of Modernism (Metonymic Drift)’, in In Visible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity, ed. Terry Smith (Sydney: Power Publications, 1997), 184–213; ‘Realism of Low Resolution: Digitisation and Modern Painting’, in Impossible Presence: Surface and Screen in the Photogenic Era, ed. Terry Smith (Sydney: Power Publications, 2001), 124–56; ‘Puppet and Test Pattern: Mechanicity and Materiality in Modern Pictorial Representation’, in From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, ed. Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 327–50; ‘Dream of Abstraction', in Paths to Abstraction 1867–1917, ed. Terence Maloon (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2010), 52–69. I thank Roger Anthony (Willem de Kooning Foundation, New York) and Jessamine Batario (University of Texas at Austin) for their essential aid with my research.

3. Rudy Burckhardt (recalling de Kooning’s attitude during the 1930s), ‘Long Ago with Willem de Kooning’, Art Journal 48 (Fall 1989): 216.

4. See Amei Wallach, ‘Jasper Johns at the Top of His Form’ (1988), in Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. Kirk Varnedoe (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 226. During the 1980s, Johns painted variants of Picasso images with encaustic applied with heat, producing his own versions of ‘melted Picasso’. With analogous visual metaphor, de Kooning called Rothko’s paintings ‘blurred [Josef] Albers’ (interview notes by Irving Sandler, 25 April, 1957, Irving Sandler Papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles).

5. Pablo Picasso, quoted in Alexander Liberman, ‘Picasso’, Vogue, 1 November, 1956, 134.

6. See Richard Shiff, ‘Turn’, in Picasso Black and White, ed. Carmen Giménez (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2012), 40–57.

7. De Kooning, interviewed in Door Bibeb, ‘Willem de Kooning: Ik vind dat alles een mond moet hebben en ik zet de mond waar ik wil’, Vrij Nederland (Amsterdam), 5 October, 1968, 3. I thank Mette Gieskes and Charles Cramer for the translation.

8. De Kooning, in Bibeb, ‘Willem de Kooning’, 3.

9. See Richard Shiff, ‘Willem de Kooning: Same Change’, in Late Thoughts: Reflections on Artists and Composers at Work, ed. Karen Painter and Thomas Crow (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006), 36–53.

10. Harold Rosenberg, Willem de Kooning (New York: Abrams, 1974), 30.

11. Willem de Kooning, ‘Content is a Glimpse’ (statement edited by Thomas B. Hess and Harold Rosenberg, from an interview conducted by David Sylvester, March, 1960), Location 1, no. 1 (Spring 1963): 47.

12. Willem de Kooning, Drawings (New York: Walker, 1967), n.p. Drawing blindly was a common exercise among artists of the twentieth century; and de Kooning may well have experimented with it during earlier periods, along with left-handed drawing and drawing with both hands simultaneously.

13. ‘I draw while I watch TV’: de Kooning, in Bibeb, 3. ‘These screaming girls [in a drawing] were observed on television’: Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning Drawings (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1972), 53. See also Rosenberg, Willem de Kooning, 35.

14. Hands embody regulative habits as much as eyes do. Yet, because our culture has long privileged the eye as the dominant and most mental of the senses, we tend to ignore the possibility that in circumventing its authority we substitute one aesthetic tyranny (of the tactile) for another (of the optical). De Kooning sought to defeat any conventional habits of his hand as much as those of his eye.

15. De Kooning, quoted in Sam Hunter, ‘De Kooning: Je dessine les yeux fermés’, Galerie Jardin des Arts, 152 (November 1975): 69 (author’s translation).

16. De Kooning, Drawings, n.p.

17. See Judith Wolfe, ‘Glimpses of a Master’, Willem de Kooning: Works from 1951–1981 (East Hampton: Guild Hall Museum, 1981), 14.

18. Susan Brockman, author’s interview, 26 September, 1993.

19. Opinions and possibly the precise words of de Kooning, in ‘Interviews for [Look] article’ (c. January 1969), Papers of Charlotte Willard, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington.

20. Nijinsky’s words in 1909, quoted in Richard Buckle, Nijinsky (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), 92.

21. De Kooning, audiotaped statement, interview by Michael C. Sonnabend and Kenneth Snelson, summer 1959, typescript, Willem de Kooning Foundation, New York.

22. Elaine de Kooning, in Connie Fox, Bill King, and Frazier Dougherty, De Kooning at the Whitney with Elaine de Kooning, videotape (New York, 1984) (courtesy Connie Fox).

23. Hess, Willem de Kooning Drawings, 22. During the late 1930s, de Kooning constructed a male mannequin, dressed it, and, wishing to preserve a specific pattern of folds, used glue to make the pattern permanent.

24. De Kooning, in Willard, ‘De Kooning’, 58.

25. De Kooning, statement in Daniel Frasnay, The Artist’s World (New York: Viking, 1969), 221.

26. See Richard Shiff, ‘Water and Lipstick: De Kooning in Transition’, in Willem de Kooning: Paintings, ed. Marla Prather (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 37.

27. Conrad Fried, author’s interview, 10 October, 1993.

28. Susan Brockman, author’s interview, 28 August, 1993.

29. De Kooning, quoted in John G. Powers, ‘12 Paintings from the Powers’ Collection', Aspen, no. 3 (1965–66): n.p.

30. Garner Tullis, author's interview, 28 May 1993.

31. John McMahon, author's interview, 8 March 2001.

32. See Note 19.

33. See, for example, Thomas B. Hess, ‘De Kooning Paints a Picture’, Artnews 52, no. 1 (March 1953): 66; Thomas B. Hess, De Kooning: Recent Paintings (New York: Knoedler, 1967), 20.

34. De Kooning, in Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Capricorn, 1961), 102. The circumstances that gave rise to this statement are complex, and it may be a paraphrase rather than a direct quotation.

35. De Kooning, in Harold Rosenberg, ‘Interview with Willem de Kooning’, Artnews 71, no. 5 (September 1972): 57.

36. De Kooning, quoted in David Sylvester, ‘De Kooning’s Women’, Sunday Times Magazine (London), (8 December 1968), 52.

37. See the interpretation developed in Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 348–53.

38. De Kooning, in Hunter, 70 (author’s translation).

39. John McMahon, author’s interview, 25 February, 1994; 8 March, 2001.

40. Susan Brockman, author’s interview, 6 September, 1993.

41. De Kooning, in Hunter, 69 (author’s translation).

All works © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Licensed by Viscopy.