ART CHRONICLE
527
the most distinguished work of the two decades. Two of these were in
the Whitney show,
Dark Pond
(1948) and
Attic
(1950), and the best
of them that I have seen is the black
Painting
(1948) in the Museum of
Modern Art's permanent collection. These paintings are solidly con–
structed; everything on the surface is mobilized in the depiction of forms,
including the so-called "dripping" which has never played a major role
in de Kooning's style. There is no residue of gratuitous gesturing.
The source of these paintings has been the vocabulary of forms
which Picasso's great synthesis has placed at the disposal of all the
artists of our time. This may well be the essence of Picasso's role in
modern art: to have shored up these fragments against the final debacle
of easel art. De Kooning's work thus comes to us, as it were, off the
top of Picasso's head, and therefore like Abstract Expressionist painting
as a whole, it lives off the formal capital of the post-Impressionist and
School of Paris art which make it possible.
Precisely what this can mean for an artist of de Kooning's serious–
ness has been dramatized by his recent paintings on the theme of
Woman.
These, too, represent a draft on Picasso's capital; but a
struggle for a more monumental vision also asserts itself in these pictures,
a struggle so naked in its earnestness and ambition that the paintings are
frequently painful to look at. I think this "pain" ultimately derives from
their failure--and it has been de Kooning's misfortune to come into
his greatest publicity at the moment when his art is most problematic.
The synthetic base from which he operates is so ubiquitous that even
the re-introduction of the human figure has had to be made in Picasso's
idiom. De Kooning is making the most interesting attempt today to
transform this synthetic idiom into a style which is more heroic, more
visionary, and more solidly constructed than it has been in the last de–
cade, but he is a little like Sisyphus in Hades: the more strength he
puts behind each thrust of the stone, the more crashing is each defeat.
He is attempting nothing less (to paraphrase Cezanne) than to make
something solid out of Abstract Expressionism, and
it
remains to be seen
whether it can be done.
1
1 The showing of de Kooning's recent picture,
Composition
(1955), at
the Guggenheim Museum in September makes one skeptical that anything solid
can come out of his efforts in the Abstract Expressionist style. It is a dismal
performance, having more in common with the artist's imitators than with the
work he produced himself in the late 'forties. Its presence in the Guggenheim
is curious; were it to be exhibited in the more historically minded Modern,
one might suppose its exhibition could be justified on grounds of representing
the artist at a critical moment in his development; but at the Guggenheim, where
the emphasis has been on the quality of specific works, its display is baffling.
