Thrilling glimpses of de Kooning

REVIEW

October 16, 2011|By Sebastian Smee, Globe Staff

Above: Willem de Kooning painted this Seated Woman around 1940. Below:… (THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM…)

DE KOONING: A Retrospective At: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Through Jan. 9. 212-708-9400. www.moma.org

NEW YORK - I sometimes fantasize about seeing the work of Willem de Kooning - the subject of a blistering retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York - reflected in a funhouse mirror, a wind-whipped puddle, an oil slick. Would all the wobbles and curves in his work straighten out? The blood-bubbling colors cool down? Some glimpsed ghost of a form crystallize into a clean-lined goddess?

I doubt it. Two wrongs don’t make a right. But two wrong turns?

De Kooning (1904-97) was the great 20th-century master of righting wrong turns, and then, as often as not, re-wronging them. He took these turns with his eyes closed, with water mixed in his paint, with alcohol in his arteries. A stowaway immigrant from the Netherlands with classical training and an apprenticeship in sign painting, he had ace after ace up his sleeve, but what he enjoyed most was tossing them to the floor.

“I’m in my element when I am a little bit out of this world,’’ he said. “When I’m falling, I’m doing all right; when I’m slipping, I say, hey, this is interesting!’’

De Kooning was not, as the critic Hilton Kramer notoriously said of Philip Guston, “a mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum.’’ His palpable virtuosity never left the arena. But he threw everything in its way, longing, it seems, for that sensation of tripping, of falling.

The thrill of looking at de Kooning’s work is tied to a similar sensation: the excitement of watching anyone truly gifted push repeatedly into the unknown, the unmastered - and then mastering it.

“Content,’’ he famously said, “is a glimpse.’’ De Kooning once told his brother-in-law, Conrad Fried, that the phrase - and de Kooning’s related description of his art as a “slipping glimpse’’ - derived from memories of Amsterdam prostitutes flashing their breasts for a fraction of a second. (As de Kooning recalled this, said Fried, “He would make this gesture of moving his hand across his chest.’’)

Fried’s recollection, though hardly the end of it, feels apt, since it reminds us what a carnal painter de Kooning was, and how mischievous. His other famous quote - “Flesh was the reason oil paint was invented’’ - should never be far from your mind as you traverse this show, which bobbles with body parts slippingly glimpsed.

Organized by MoMA’s John Elderfield, the retrospective is presented in a context of slight institutional defensiveness: MoMA did give de Kooning an early retrospective in 1969, but it did not collect his work with the same avidity as the work of abstract expressionist peers such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, and Robert Motherwell.