Slap and Twist

By * Robert Hughes

"Like Western civilization, like humanity itself, De Kooning is constantly declared by critics to be in a state of decline." So spoke Critic Harold Rosenberg some years ago. There is no doubt that since the middle 1960s, Willem de Kooning has suffered in reputation. As one of the father figures of Abstract Expressionism, he has offended critics who believe in the iron laws of stylistic turnover by outliving his "period." Moreover, it is five years since De Kooning, now 68, produced a show; whatever the celebrated Dutch expatriate (who moved to the U.S. in 1926) might have been doing in his studio at Springs, L.I., was veiled from the public. Now a one-man show by De Kooning at the Sidney Janis Gallery in Manhattan supplies the answer, and it is startling enough. In addition to a group of paintings, De Kooning's new activity is sculpture.

In retrospect, De Kooning seems to have hardly ever painted an abstract picture. The resistant surfaces of the real world are always there in the paint, whether explicitly--as in the Woman series 20 years ago--or by implication, in the fleshy rub and friction of one biomorphic shape against another. His new canvases suggest (not only by their titles) the low, flat landscapes of Long Island: high-keyed pinks and yellows and acid greens, a flicker of noon light, blue heat-haze on the potato fields, a jumble of sun-flushed legs on the sand. With a handful of minor exceptions, De Kooning's paint work manages to avoid the rather flaccid, glutinous and mushy quality it assumed in the middle '60s; his gestures occupy a curious middle ground between bravura swipe and pastelly softness, and the pigment oozes suggestively, a matrix of wavering depths. The sum effect is of sensual chaos, but modified with knowing flicks and placements: sprawl as form, luscious and--despite all the turbulence on top --lazily seductive. They are among the most accessible canvases De Kooning has made.

The sculptures are a different matter. If the paintings are largely about landscape as body, De Kooning's bronzes are body as landscape. There is no question of exploiting the material, either through the subtleties of patina or its inherent sense of mass; few bronzes, indeed, recall so insistently their origins as clay. They are cindery lumps of inert matter, pummeled and squashed with what appears at first to be a paroxysm of gratuitous violence. In the largest piece, Clam Digger (1972), De Kooning's love of direct action reaches the outer limits of credibility: this mud-footed golem, clumping along inside his ridged, tormented epidermis, is all gesture, assuming form in a challengingly haphazard way. De Kooning's sculptures admittedly look regressive. They evoke memories of the European Expressionism of the 1950s--Dubuffet's turnip men and the familiar postwar imagery of the human figure as disaster area. Thus Figure XII, 1970, lying with outflung arms on a bronze-cast roof tile, obscurely suggests the traditional image of crucifixion even though it could just as easily be a sunbather. De Kooning's new work is a matter of symptom, rather than code; its contortions carry less meaning than one is apt to suppose.

But for all their stubborn disregard of what sculpture "ought" to look like in the 1970s, De Kooning's bronzes stand in an interesting relationship to his paintings -- as, indeed, the sculpture of major painters often does. Henri Matisse's casts, for instance, served as a receptacle for those instincts toward solid, feelable shape which he could not (with out violating the development of his work as a painter) get into his canvases. De Kooning imagery has long tended toward the monstrous. But the images existed in a fictional space, descended from Cubism, flattened and modulated. One may guess that De Kooning felt curious about how his figures might look off the page, when the surface violence of brushmarks was translated into the more actual violence of the hand-slapping and twisting lumps of clay.

The silhouette of a piece like Floating Figure, 1972, is almost identical to the wavering calligraphy in his new paintings. But they do not seem so, being solid. It is a demonstration of how an artist's handwriting can change its expressive meaning by changing medium. One may doubt De Kooning's future as a sculptor--but not his unfading vitality.

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