 |
| Willem de Kooning in his studio |
My life in art: How Willem de Kooning played Cupid
Friday 21 November 2008
The artist Willem de Kooning changed my life. Before De Kooning I had no real interest in art. Constable was for the top of cake tins and Warhol seemed no more than a competent graphic designer. I took a very literal view of art, whereas I found movies, music and books transformative – all of which would have been quite normal if I was 12-years-old, or even 17. But I wasn't: I was 25. I had managed to live a quarter of a century without art making any notable impression on me. And, to be honest, the circumstances which started this late journey were only brought about through ulterior motives.
I had organised a weekend away in Amsterdam with my girlfriend and had drawn up what I thought was a pretty fun itinerary. I planned to sample the local speciality and nightlife, leaving the daytime as a recovery zone. It was a well-researched plan, one that I was hugely looking forward to implementing. Unbeknown to me, though, my girlfriend had other ideas. She wanted to visit Amsterdam's great museums, eat in good restaurants and – if time allowed – to go for a long walk … boring. This was a potential disaster that needed to be avoided. Cunningly, I suggested a compromise: one of her activities, followed by one of mine. I figured that once we had started on my itinerary there'd be no going back, and for the sake of a little goodwill, there wasn't any harm in a quick museum visit.
So, we went to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam's modern art gallery. As soon as I stepped over the threshold I got a nagging ache in my lower spine accompanied by uncontrollable yawning. By the time we had gone round the first gallery, I desperately needed a sit down. I sank heavy-legged on to a pine bench and wiped the tears of boredom from my cheeks. A frosty glare suggested that I was not making a very favourable impression with the girl. Feigning interest, I upped my game. We looked at a painting with yellow splodges that appeared to be a child's effort at a fried egg and I started to feel nauseous. My girlfriend liked it, though. She did that tilting your head thing you see art connoisseurs do.
I made a big deal of looking at it again for signs of poetic life. To be fair, it wasn't quite as bad as I had originally thought. There was a sumptuousness to the brushstrokes that was beguiling. The pink element was fabulously flesh-like and the white section in the middle had a roughness that hinted at sun shining through a broken cloud. It was also true that the more I looked at the painting, the more I saw in it. I continued to stare, but this time out of choice. It was actually very beautiful, and harmonious. I began to find it calming and a little sensual, warming, optimistic. The girlfriend had said it was like poetry. She was wrong: it was poetry.
I bent down to see who had painted this masterpiece. It was by Willem de Kooning and the work was called Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point. We spent the next four hours in the Stedelijk playing spot-the-De Kooning. Then, after lunch and on my insistence, we went back. I was on a mission. I wanted to know about this painterly genius and what had provoked him to such sublime heights.
Willlem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam in 1904. At the age of 12 he went to study at the Rotterdam Academy of Arts. In 1926, after a brief stint as a store sign-writer and art director, he left for America and settled in New York. De Kooning loved the freedom and excitement of New York, but saw it through the eyes of a man steeped in the traditional painting techniques of the Renaissance. He was also heavily influenced by the European masters from the generation before: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and his fellow countryman, Vincent Van Gogh. And it was at this precise time, between the mid-20s and the late-60s, that the clash of cultures – between the flash, brash, America and the more earnest and genteel Europe – created the ingredients for one of the most important developments in the history of art. De Kooning was at the centre of it all.
To begin with, the main protagonist was a Russian exile called Arshile Gorky, who had also found refuge and artistic sustenance in New York. Like De Kooning, Gorky was heavily influenced by the surrealist movement that had been created by André Breton in Paris. And like almost all artists of the time he studied the pioneering work of Cézanne, which had led Picasso and Braque on to cubism. De Kooning and Gorky wanted to take the figurative form beyond impressionism, beyond cubism and into total abstraction: to create paintings that felt like the subject, although the subject wasn't discernible. This meant combining the surrealists' Freudian exploration into the unconscious with the painterly techniques of Monet, Cézanne, Picasso and Braque. The upshot of which was a starring role in the New York School.
The New York School was the avant garde of the world. Its members included the Beat poets, the composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham and musicians such as Miles Davies, Stan Getz and John Coltrane. And at the centre of all this were a group of artists who came under the banner abstract expressionists. This was a group of New York artists – among them were Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Franz Kline and De Kooning - who had found a new way to paint that made no attempt to depict the subject, but aimed to communicate a feeling for a subject simply through the imaginative application of paint.
And it worked. De Kooning's painting, Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point is as beautiful, evocative a landscape painting as I have ever seen, but there's not a tree or hill in sight. It makes no attempt to represent a real scene, merely to capture the feelings you might have when looking at such a scene. And this discovery and the subsequent journey to find out how such a painting came about, truly did change my life. The girlfriend is now my wife and my interest in art – dormant for so long – is now so great that I work for an art gallery. And best of all, I still have my fabulous Amsterdam itinerary up my sleeve to enjoy on some future occasion.
No comments:
Post a Comment