I’m about 100 pages from the end of De Kooning: An American Master, the biography I’ve been reading for the past few weeks. It’s still a gripping read, even though there’s inevitably some repetition of themes and the writing occasionally gets carried away by its own dramatic flourishes, especially when the authors pause to describe de Kooning’s paintings in detail. Instead of trying to do a grand summation of the book, I want to relate two memorable anecdotes from the book’s second half that evoke, for me, the pathos of de Kooning’s long and conflicted career that I expect will linger long after I return the book to the public library (a day or so late). After the modest success of his big black and white abstractions in the late 1940s and the praise garnered by his major abstract work, Excavation in 1950 (you can see the copyrighted image here), de Kooning turned back to the figure, much to the chagrin of the formidable art critic Clement Greenberg, who believed the future of great modern art lay in pure abstraction. It was a risky and unexpected move on the painter’s part—people expected him to build on his recent success and continue in the mode of Excavation. But, as the authors tell it, de Kooning was never one to bow to external pressures, to take the expected route. What’s interesting is that this contrarian streak wasn’t enough to carry him through and allow him to boldly articulate his own vision. He began work on what would become his series of Woman paintings, “reopen[ing] his attack on half-buried problems, both formal and emotional.” But he had great difficulty with his new project, working and reworking the same canvas for years, with no sign of completion. Again, de Kooning’s life seems defined not by a maverick confidence that ignores others because he’s sure of what he’s doing, but by a searching struggle and deep ambivalence. Early on in this struggle with Woman, we are told, de Kooning saw a retrospective at MoMA of the painter Chaim Soutine, who painted people, landscapes, and animal carcasses alike with a thick impasto and in lurid colors. Perhaps it is just a bit of imaginative reconstruction on the authors’ part when they suggest that de Kooning’s encounter with this little-known European artist (also poor, also an “outsider”) came at just the right time to “give de Kooning the fortitude to make art that disappointed taste and stood outside the fashion of the time.” But I liked it anyway, as a story of inspiration and influence. That is, it seemed to highlight not just the anxiety, but the necessity of influence for creativity.

The anecdote also resonated with me, because I had encountered Soutine’s work for the first time in Paris years ago, and in reading of de Kooning’s experience, I felt like I could share in his enthusiasm, and understand—even though I’m not a painter—why Soutine’s canvases might have excited him. The story said something to me about aesthetic experience, and how important it is, for artists and for the rest of us alike, that it be shared, that you’re able to say, “yes, me too!” “yes, I know!” I remember the experience of seeing Soutine very clearly because of such a sharing. We were at the l’Orangerie to see Monet’s waterlilies, but around the rotunda upstairs was a group of paintings that looked unfamiliar. My future husband and I walked around in opposite directions to take a look. When we met up again, we realized we had been similarly impressed by the distinctively visceral brushstroke, the expressive colors and contortions of form, though I think what we actually said was, “Wow.” and “Yeah, wow.” The “discovery” of Soutine was more memorable because we had separately come to the same conclusion. Back to de Kooning: Even with Soutine’s example, it would take de Kooning almost 3 years to complete his series of six Woman paintings. But when he did, he was vindicated; in 1953, “the art world thronged to the opening of the Women show at the Sidney Janis Gallery” and MoMA came knocking. The second anecdote, then, takes place in the afterglow of this success—simultaneously sudden and long overdue (de Kooning was almost 50)—when a young, admiring artist named Robert Rauschenberg paid a visit to de Kooning’s studio with a bottle of whiskey and a bold request. He had come to ask de Kooning for a drawing so that he could erase it. (Okay, here, anxiety of influence would apply!) I had learned of Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning (and his other important early work, Bed) probably in the same art history course where I’d first seen all the other de Koonings, but I never knew the circumstances of how the work had come (not) to be. It’s not simply de Kooning’s granting of this request, but the way he did it that makes the story: Stevens and Swan write: After telling Rauschenberg, “I know what you’re doing,” de Kooning proceeded to go through his portfolios of drawings slowly and methodically: If the episode marks a triumph for the younger artist—the Erased de Kooning established Rauschenberg as an important figure in the emerging Pop Art movement—it’s suffused with an ironic mournfulness for de Kooning: Yet, this moment with Rauschenberg is no less a shared aesthetic experience than de Kooning’s recognition of himself in Soutine. And maybe it’s this sense of the shared, intimate understanding that he felt Rauschenberg had betrayed, for the public wouldn’t know the extent of de Kooning’s collaboration in the erasure of his own hand. (References in cyberspace to Erased de Kooning as an example of all that’s wrong with post-modern art do get the details wrong—one believes Rauschenberg asked his “buddy” for the drawing, another thinks he bought it.) In any case, these anecdotes seem to underscore the existential conundrum (if I can use such fancy terms) of being an artist—of never being alone even when one is essentially alone in the struggle with one’s work. This may be just another way of naming the conundrum of “originality,” which Erased de Kooning most emphatically does “in the joking language of Dada.” Still, the details of the stories provide the emotional flesh and bones to abstractions. De Kooning’s canvases seem richer in the context of Soutine’s and vice versa. Erased de Kooning is now much more than an irreverent and witty gesture aimed at the art establishment. Rauschenberg erased a de Kooning in 1953, but de Kooning himself continued working for the next 30+ years, creating new work well into his 80s, even as dementia began to set in. If most things came late to him (even his alcoholism emerged only in middle age), if he was never as prolific as other artists, it turned out, nevertheless, that time was on his side.

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