Exhibition note. (Art).(Willem de Kooning)(Brief Article)

"The Artist's Hand: Willem de Kooning Drawings, 1937 to 1954," at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York January 17-March 2, 2002

Willem de Kooning once pronounced that "Style is a fraud," adding, "I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns." Confronted with the restless array of styles found in the twenty-seven drawings on view in this significant and wholly engrossing show, one was tempted to swivel one's head in disbelief. How could someone who approached drawing from so many angles, and whose pencil expressed so many moods, deny style? The answer, of course, was in the evidence before one's eye. A limpid commercial drawing, abstract interiors, calm linear portraits, frenzied semi-abstract figures: what connects all of them is not a retreat from style but an unwillingness to settle for a particular way of looking. The undulant, parabolic curves that in Untitled (Mechanical Interior) from the late thirties connect circles and spoked wheels also describe the swell of hips in his drawings of women in the fifties, and, one recalls, those same curves float free of description in his late abstract canvases of the eighties. The style in all these works varies, but the identity of the man who made them remains as identifiable and constant as his signature. In a lecture, de Kooning once confessed that "The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves." Style may be a fraud; it was by rummaging through styles that he sought his sense of order.

What one saw at Mitchell-Innes & Nash is not the Matissean pursuit of order-asquietude but a relentless search for a certain visual honesty. The story these drawings tell is extraordinary--a tale of rangy disquietude and consistent mastery. It touches on many of the artistic movements of the first half of the century, from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism, yet is confined by none of them. Amusement in the title Study for Father, Mother, Brother and Sister or Study for Father Mother, Sister and Brother (c. 1937-39), a work in pencil on paper, registers also in the humorous, leech-like form seated on a straight-backed chair and in the upside-down shadow cast against the room's back wall. The use of biomorphic stand-ins for figures, the attention to illusory depth, and the stage-like quality of the room in the drawing all indicate its debt to Surrealism, and I, for one, am grateful that de Kooning plucked from that movement its whimsical tone rather than its more serious, though less creditable, pretensions. However, even in what amounts to a pastiche of Surrealism, one finds the artist's enduring obsessions. Hovering in the upper left-hand corner is a shape whose distinctive hill-and-valley curve reappears as a haunch in Woman (c. 1942), in the more abstract Untitled (Reclining Woman) (c. 1945), and in a number of other later drawings. In the abstract Untitled (c. 1942), a study of shaded areas of negative space holds together overlapping and contiguous planes in a manner that alludes to Cubism and collage without ever quite tipping its stylistic hand in either direction.

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