KAR..EN WILKIN
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reassuring patrons that they are in the presence of Something Important,
but essentially, he is an accomplished maker of refined, sophisticated,
subtle, and not very demanding pictures. Now, in an access of either
revisionist scholarship or astute marketing - take your pick - he is touted
as the link between Pollock and the present, his vocabulary of repetitive
marks interpreted as translations of Abstract Expressionism's
psychologically loaded gestures into hip, upscale, educated graffiti. Much
of the material on the show circu lated by MOMA stressed, not always
facetious ly, that whi le Twombly's work resembled children's scribbles, it
was, in fact, aesthetically conceived; the problem, however, is not that
his suave doodles don't look enough like art, but rather, too much like
it.
The weakness of Twombly's paintings were emphasized by the close
proximity of the de Kooning retrospective. Not that de Kooning is a
model of unalloyed excellence. His work of the 1940s is some of the
most original, powerful, and just plain best painting done in America,
but after 1950, he rarely reached the level of expressiveness and intensity
set by those early pictures - except in his drawings, which remained al–
most consistently superb. And it is drawing that largely determines the
strength of the early paintings, whether the creepily beautiful portraits of
the early 1940s, the fierce Picasso-inspired figures that fo ll owed, or the
astonishing, nervous black and white abstractions of 1948: a language of
articulate edges, of fluent, responsive, wristy lines that not only define
shapes, but bite into space, carving out a shallow, unstable zone in which
planes with un namable shapes shift and hover. (It's essentially Cubist
space; Clement Greenberg's characterization of de Kooning as a late
Cubist was extremely accurate.) What's missing in Twombly's speedy
loops and squiggles is this sense of articulation. In de Kooning's best
work, changes in the direction of lines or edges seem driven by intense
perceptions and feelings about form. In Twombly's pictures - and in
much of de Kooning's later work - this quality is noticeably absent.
Everything stays on the surface; it seems arbitrary, even expedient. I'm
not advocating depiction, but rather, wishing that pictorial events, how–
ever spontaneous, casual, or even minimal, appear to have come about
because of overwhelming necessity - no matter how they were actually
arrived at.
The de Kooning show raised more questions than it answered. It's
hard to understand, for example, why a painter and draughtman of his
gifts should devote years of his life to neutrali zing his gesture, to inflating
calligraphic lines into broom-sized swipes that are, in comparison to the
eloquent planes of earli er works , both clumsy and mute. It is hard to
know, too, why someone who was not much of a colorist - witness the
