Willem de Kooning, perhaps the greatest American painter of the 20th century, was a poor but handsome Dutch immigrant who toiled happily in obscurity, drank too much once he gained acclaim, and remained gloriously productive – even after developing an Alzheimer's-like dementia in his 80s.
De Kooning ("the king" in Dutch) grew up a pauper in his native Rotterdam and became a prince of the New York school of painting at a time when New York supplanted Paris as the center of the international art world.
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan's "De Kooning: An American Master" puts the artist's story in its rich cultural context. It's a wonderful biography, not only because of de Kooning's central place in the abstract expressionist movement, but equally because the authors – a husband and wife team – write so clearly and so well.
De Kooning arrived in New York in 1926, at the age of 22, and he lived the bohemian artist's life in all its hardship and glamour.
Willing to subsist on very little so long as he could paint and draw, he made ends meet by doing commercial art and illustration. The WPA's Federal Art Project helped him get through the Depression. "I'm not poor. I'm broke," de Kooning liked to say. He didn't have his first bank account until he was 46.
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De Kooning
An American Master
Mark Stevens and
Annalyn Swan
Knopf, 733 pages, $35
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Talented refugee painters, fleeing dictator-ravaged Europe, enriched New York's art scene in the 1930s and 1940s, but the city still seemed less an art capital than a provincial backwater. And the public was naturally resistant to the abstract revolution that de Kooning and his bohemian friends were creating.
Then, Life magazine, in its Aug. 8, 1949, issue, asked whether Jackson Pollock was "the greatest living painter in the United States."
The article had the effect of enshrining both Pollock and the entire abstract expressionist movement. A photograph showed Pollock scowling, his arms defiantly crossed, a cigarette dangling from his lips.
Pollock and de Kooning were friendly rivals, but, as Stevens and Swan observe, neither "was the sort of man who could banish competition, end neurotic nonsense, and tell wives and others to stop meddling."
Until Pollock's violent death in a car crash in 1956, it was team de Kooning versus team Pollock. Each had a powerful critic in his corner – Clement Greenberg backed Pollock, while Harold Rosenberg took de Kooning's side.
Each artist was married to a gifted painter and formidable advocate. It was a gaudy footnote to their rivalry that Ruth Kligman, Pollock's mistress, filled the same role for de Kooning after Pollock's death.
De Kooning always had a knack for long-lasting friendships, and one of the joys of this book is the extraordinary cast of painters, critics, dealers and poets – the artist's friends, rivals and lovers – that it parades before us.
Artist Arshile Gorky, a tragic genius, served as de Kooning's mentor in the 1930s. Franz Kline was his drinking partner at the Cedar Tavern during the heyday of abstract expressionism, when existentialism eased out Marxism as the favorite foreign ideology. People said Kline "lived on beer the way a baby lived on mother's milk."
Among the most beguiling figures in the cast is de Kooning's wife Elaine, an artist in her own right who was commissioned by John F. Kennedy to paint his presidential portrait in 1962. Elaine realized after marrying Bill that he was already married to his work and that the two of them could not live together harmoniously.
Bill and Elaine de Kooning were estranged for two decades. He loved a succession of other women and had a daughter with one of them. Nevertheless, Elaine remained a loyal and effective ally, and de Kooning turned to her for help and companionship in his final years.
As an artist, de Kooning was famously exacting. Many times he would finish a painting, only to erase it and begin anew. Long before he won over the critics, he earned the respect and admiration of his destitute fellow artists.
The artist's abstract paintings – such as "Excavation" (1950), "Easter Monday" (1955-56), "Ruth's Zowie" (1957) – are peerless. Yet the painter never renounced the figure, and the most controversial (some would say the best) of his works depict "Woman," not as erotic or maternal, but as monstrous and grotesque.
To this day, his series of women from the 1950s retain their power to shock. In a brilliant chapter entitled "Bitch Goddess," Stevens and Swan point out that the sources of "Woman I" (1950-52) include pinup girls in posters. This painting, the authors note, is undeniably an expression of "sublime vulgarity" accompanied by a "kind of manic, hooting, and inelegant laughter."
De Kooning was the major artist of the existential era – a hero of doubt, ambiguity and despair. In his black-and-white paintings of the late 1940s, the figure and the ground keep shifting as if uncertainty were the governing principle. When critic Rosenberg coined the phrase "action painter," he had de Kooning in mind.
A skeptic might note that the same Harold Rosenberg had, as an advertising man, invented Smokey Bear. But in any account of the American avant-garde, de Kooning is bound to come off as a titan, not only because of his miraculous longevity but because the others in his circle – a headstrong, ego-driven bunch – seemed naturally to defer to him.
The story of the New York painters has been told before, but seldom with the grace, wit and skill that Stevens and Swan achieve. Their "De Kooning" will be definitive for a long time to come.
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