Dana Costache

29 Sept 2011, New York

Three billion dollars are hanging on the walls of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

When I heard the number, right before I entered the exhibition, I couldn’t imagine how much art would fit into its enormousness. Yet, we’re only talking about 200 paintings and sculptures on display on MoMA’s sixth floor.  This is the museum’s most valuable exhibition ever hosted on the premises.  And only one artist’s name is there, scribbled in the lower right corners of some of the most expensive paintings in the world: Willem de Kooning. The American abstract expressionist.

“De Kooning: A Retrospective” took six years to set up, bringing together the artist’s works (paintings and sculptures) from public and private collections.

The exhibition opened to the public this September and will close in January 2012. There was only one thing shading my recent visit at MoMA, and that was the “no pictures inside the exhibition” rule.

People think great art makes an artist immortal. It is, in fact, the story behind the art, sparking the creator’s imagination in such an electrical way that strangers are touched by it, while merely looking at a piece of canvas. What we experience is the electricity of what happened before the art was born.  Elaine de Kooning, Willem’s wife, and an abstract expressionist herself, said it best: “A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.”

Many of us would agree that the verb behind painfully beautiful art is, usually, to suffer from love. Yet it was not this kind of suffering that fueled de Kooning’s creative hand. Painting was his own way to face the debilitating power of a woman’s beauty and femininity. De Kooning did not paint women from a state of adulation, which we often find in the works of poets. His series of distorted “Women”, some featuring two heads, is taking his own behavior in his relationship with women, from a state of fear, where sharing his feelings openly is impossible, to a state of empowerment, where he becomes the master of the women he paints. The fact that one of the most powerful women in the world, Blanchette Rockefeller, bought one of his “women” and made him famous, might just be the right happy ending for the story of not only his art, but his life.

The Retrospective at MoMA is intimidating, as is the size of several of de Kooning’s paintings. I don’t know what should impress me more: the abundance of great art around me or the price these paintings have been sold for.  De Kooning’s “Woman III” is the second most expensive individual painting ever sold (137.5 million dollars), only topped by Jackson Pollok’s “No. 5”, which went for 140 million.

Born in Rotterdam, in 1904, de Kooning painted for 70 years. A graduate of the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts, his lucky stroke came when he was chosen to join a group of 38 artists who would paint the 105 public murals at the New York World’s Fair in 1939.

In New York, he became a part of what was called the “New York School”, a group that included other painters such Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston and Clyfford Still.

Even if it is Arshile Gorky, the Armenian-American painter, who is considered to be the “father” of American abstract expressionism, the majority of young abstract painters following de Kooning think of his work as being the most inspirational. De Kooning was one of the most admired, copied, envied and criticized American painters of all times. In fact, de Kooning’s contemporary but younger peer, American painter Robert Rauschenberg, became famous for buying a de Kooning, erasing it and then presenting it as his own work, under the name of “Erased de Kooning.” In an interview (available on Youtube), Rauschenberg tells the story of going to the middle-aged de Kooning’s home and asking for one of his drawings, disclosing his intention to erase it. De Kooning famously said “I will give you one that I will miss”, but also one that “you will find difficult to erase.” Rauschenberg spent two months erasing through charcoal, oil paint, crayon and pencil.

At the time of his “Erased de Kooning”, Rauschenberg was doing mostly monochromatic work. Erasing de Kooning’s drawing left more than a blank surface – it created a “ghostly monochromatic work without imagery”. Rauschenberg’s idea, though highly criticized, stroke gold. People spent more time in front of the “Erased de Kooning” looking for what could have been there, than watching one of his paintings with an actual image.

Rauschenberg’s audacity also had an ideological purpose, serving the anti-de Kooning “rebellious” movement many young abstract painters were embracing in the ‘50s. Metaphorically, de Kooning had to be “erased”, for new and original art to be created.

What made de Kooning famous? His most treasured paintings are a series of “Women”. His art shouts his obsession with flesh, and especially with the incredible power of the woman’s body. De Kooning did a few paintings of men, in his youth, but soon moved to women, which remained his leitmotif throughout his lifetime.

“Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented” – the painter himself said.

It was MoMA that bought “Woman I”, upon its completion in 1952, followed shortly by Blanchette Rockefeller who bought “Woman II”. For de Kooning, fearful and uncertain that his two “Women” will be critically understood, this was the recognition he so longed for. 

The MoMA Retrospective also includes most of De Kooning’s black-and-white paintings, the most famous of which is “Attic”, painted with oil, enamel, and newspaper transfer on canvas. Between 1946 and 1949, de Kooning produced a series of highly abstract black-and-white-paintings that culminated in “Attic”. What most people don’t know is that, during that time, de Kooning was too poor to afford buying color pigments.

Even though he painted women regularly in the 1940s, it was only in the 50s that de Kooning started to paint women exclusively, a creative period that will last a decade and will make him famous. From the late 1950s to the early 1960s, De Kooning entered a new stage, distancing from the human body and painting more landscapes.

In 1964, De Kooning was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson.

In later years (starting around the 80s) de Kooning was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He continued to paint even in the more advanced stage of his condition. There is much debate around the artistic value of his 1980s paintings, because his style had become almost graphic, alluding to his early works. The market value of his work from the 40s to the 70s had skyrocketed in the last decade of his life. De Kooning passed away in March 1997.