"AMERICAN-TYPE" PAINTING
183
one of the greatest artists we have had in this country. His
art
was
largely unappreciated in his lifetime, but a few years after
his
tragic
death in 1948, at the age of forty-four, it was invoked and imitated
by younger painters in New York who wanted to save elegance and
traditional draughtsmanship for abstract painting. However, Gorky
finished rather than began something, and finished it so well that
anybody who follows
him
is condemned to' academicism.
Willem de Kooning was a mature artist long before his first show
in 1948. His culture is similar to Gorky's (to whom he was close) and
he, too, is a draughtsman before anything else, perhaps an even more
gifted one than Gorky and certainly more inventive. Ambition is as
much a problem for him as it was for his dead friend, but in the in–
verse sense, for he has both the advantages and the liabilities-which
may be greater-of an aspiration larger and more sophisticated, up
to a certain point, than that of any other living artist I know of except
Picasso. On the face of it, de Kooning proposes a synthesis of mod–
ernism and tradition, and a larger control over the means of abstract
painting that would render it capable of statements in a grand style
equivalent to that of the past. The disembodied contours of Michel–
angelo's and Rubens's nude figure compositions haunt
his
abstract
pictures, yet the dragged off-whites, grays, and blacks by which they
are inserted in a shallow illusion of depth-which de Kooning, no
more than any other painter of the time, can deepen without risk
of second-hand effect-bring the Picasso of the early '30s persistently
to mind. But there are even more essential resemblances, though they
have little to do with imitation on de Kooning's part. He, too, hankers
after
terribilita,
prompted by a similar kind of culture and by a sim–
ilar nostalgia for tradition. No more than Picasso can he tear himself
away from the human figure, and from the modeling of it for which
his gifts for line and shading so richly equip
him.
And it would seem
that there was even more Luciferian pride behind de Kooning's am–
bition: were he to realize it, all other ambitious painting would have
to stop for a while because he would have set its forward as well as
backward limits for a generation to come.
If
de Kooning's art has found a readier acceptance than most
other forms of abstract expressionism, it is because his need to include
the past as well as forestall the future reassures most of us. And in
any case, he remains a late Cubist. And then there is his powerful,
