I’m nearly half way through the 600+ page Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of 20th-century Dutch-born American painter Willem de Kooning, written by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan and published last year. Apparently, the project took over 10 years to complete, and you can see why: the authors seem to have scoured the archives for both published and unpublished sources; and, as well as consulting the existing interviews in print and on film, they also conducted dozens of interviews of their own over the years with de Kooning’s family, friends, acquaintances, critics, and other surviving members of the New York art scene from the ‘30s to the ‘80s. The book is exhaustively documented. Such thoroughness might seem horrendously tedious—obsession with the arcana of a famous person’s life is a necessary but not sufficient trait of the biographer, but too often, that trait seems to be all there is, and the reader is awash in trivialities. This is what some of us in the writing program call a “data dump,” where the writer is not so much writing as listing information without story, facts without meaning or relevance. The other potential pitfall is that, in broad strokes, we find in de Kooning’s life all the romantic clichés of the Great Artist (gendered male): a volatile mix of torment and tenacity, plenty of women, enough booze to cause trouble, and a bohemian rootlessness so ripe for idealization. Add to that the immigrant’s tale—stowing away on a ship and arriving in America with little but ambition—and the chances for an epically hackneyed story of genius’s triumph over circumstances are quite good. Happily, there’s no data dumping in the de Kooning bio, and it’s not in the recognizable broad strokes that the interest and drama of his life lie. The authors manage, instead, to infuse life into the known clichés by shaping the innumerable details into a compelling narrative of a man embedded in circumstance, powerfully influenced by the particular people and events in his life and struggling for decades to resolve these myriad, often contrary, influences and impulses into an artistic identity of his own. Because art became the defining reality of de Kooning’s life, became a means of imagining a life apart from his impoverished and emotionally difficult childhood in Rotterdam, the narrative makes it impossible to separate the personal from the aesthetic unfolding. Woman I 1950-52 Even as well into the book as I am, I’m still surprised that I’m enjoying it so much. I can’t remember the last time I read, much less finished, a biography. Memoirs, a few; biographies, no. I wasn’t particularly a fan of de Kooning, either; I’d learned of his most famous works (like his Woman series) in college art history courses, and understood him to be a major figure of modern art, notable for never having given up the figural, even at the height of abstract expressionism’s reign. But I didn’t know (or remember) much else. When I saw the big hardcover tome at the public library, I didn’t even know it’d won a Pulitzer, though I think I must have heard of the book’s existence from somewhere. But what drew me in, and made me actually check it out, were the opening pages of the brief introduction, which begins with de Kooning’s arrival in America—Newport News, VA, to be precise—in 1926 at the age of 22. After a telling anecdote about de Kooning’s first impressions, the authors write: Pretty good, I thought: they’re aware of the narrative conventions at their disposal and are using them self-consciously, with an eye toward the wider historical and cultural contexts. After detailing the ways in which certain features of de Kooning’s life “suited an art world then being transformed by fashion and international attention,” the authors go on to write: This latter, private de Kooning is no less a figuration, no less filtered through certain prevailing myths about the artist. Yet, this acknowledgment doesn’t prevent the authors from pursuing a multi-faceted portrait of their subject that takes a clear position on how we should understand the person and his work. On the next page, they lay out their general take on de Kooning that guides the rest of the book: The combination of details particular to de Kooning’s life and bold pronouncements about his place in the pantheon of twentieth-century art made me want to read on, to learn not just about his rise to fame, but about where he started and how he got to where he did. The great achievement of the book is how the authors are able to give us the texture of de Kooning’s everyday life, and then to show how those everyday occurrences had later reverberations, opening doors of opportunity or closing them off. We learn, for example, that his poor nutrition and lack of good healthcare as a child led to dental problems from which de Kooning suffered throughout his life. Or, how he survives the Depression years by working as a designer for the A.S. Beck shoe company, made possible by the commercial art training he’d received in Holland, but at a crucial juncture, gives up the stability of the job to devote himself fully to his art. Or, how when he is at his most penniless, in the late 40s, he and fellow artist Franz Kline forego expensive oil paints, and buy black and white household enamel paints by the gallon, producing the now famous black and white abstractions that, after 20 years as a New York artist, started getting him noticed by the key critics of the day. These are the things you don’t get in any official précis or capsule summary of de Kooning’s career, some of which you can find here, here, and here (you can also see a good sampling of his work at these sites). What strikes me most in looking at these brief summaries after reading the biography is how the compilation of key facts—the highlights reel version of an artist’s life—makes everything seem so inevitable, as if each event followed logically from the one before, as if de Kooning willed the arc of his life’s story with clear-eyed purpose from the very beginning. What Stevens and Swan give us, on the other hand, is the feeling of the precariousness of de Kooning’s life—by setting the scene in great detail, by venturing psychological explanations without over-determining everything, by resisting too many proleptic intrusions, they enable the reader to reflect on how de Kooning might have experienced the particular crises and daily rhythms of his life. The consistent theme of struggle both with himself and with his external circumstances, the mental blocks and anxieties about the quality of his work against the backdrop of unglamorous poverty and relative obscurity, though mitigated by good friends and a vibrant downtown world of ideas, provides the stuff of real suspense and emotional truth. That there was little in the beginning to predict future greatness, and much along the way to deter or derail it, is surprising, delightfully ironic, and deeply moving all at the same time. Like all good historical narratives, this biography doesn’t give us the past as a record of faits accomplis, but allows us to imagine the life as lived—uncharted and unpredictable, like some Surrealist production born of accident and ardor. More next week, after I finish the book.

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