Willem De Kooning and Italy

One of the masters of the human figure during the last century was Willem de Kooning (1904-1997). His sumptuous paintings celebrated both flesh and paint. He has often been seen as a representative of gestural figuration and distortion, as found in the paintings of Chaim Soutine, Picasso, Rembrandt and the Italian (particularly Venetian) masters. It is the attachment that de Kooning had to Italian painting and the country of Italy (which he visited several times) that is the subject of the current exhibition Willem de Kooning and Italy (Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, 17 April-15 September 2024), part of the Venice Biennale. This exhibition is reviewed from the catalogue.

de Kooning, an avid afficionado of classical and Baroque painting, was long familiar with Italian art from his earliest years as an art student in Holland and later in New York. Much has been made of de Kooning’s infatuation with Rubens and Ingres – quite rightly – but this has perhaps overshadowed his debt to the Italians. de Kooning visited Italy four times, in 1959, 1959-60, 1969 and 1972. He would likely have visited sooner but he was reluctant to travel abroad because he was an illegal immigrant to the USA. There was a possibility that if he travelled overseas without straightening out his residency status, he might be refused permission to return to the USA. He spent most of his time in Rome and Venice, producing art during his longer stays in 1959-60 and 1969. The curatorial position is (perhaps obviously) that the painter’s time in Italy was more significant than many writers have appreciated. They cite the production of three significant paintings in January 1960, just after his return to Long Island, as influenced by Italy. Two of the paintings have Italian links in the titles.

Attendance at the 1969 Spoleto festival resulted in a body of calligraphic drawings, made with broad brushed in ink on paper, torn and rearranged. He also embarked on sculpting in clay while in Spoleto. The curators suggest that the move into sculpture may never have happened without this episode. If that is the case, that does indeed make the time in Italy very important. That does seem to be accurate. Herzl Emanuel, an artist acquaintance from New York, lived in Rome at the time. He ran a foundry and handed de Kooning some clay and gave him space to work. De Kooning had not previously used clay and had not considered taking up sculpture before this point. Some of his initial figurines were cast at the same scale and that seemed to be it. It was Henry Moore, in New York to exhibit with the gallery of Xavier Fourcade (de Kooning’s dealer), who saw the figurines and suggested enlarging them. Fourcade agreed tepidly but the first sculpture (enlarged by a professional foundry worker) pleased artist and dealer. We shall return to the sculptures later.

Works in the exhibition range from the early 1950s to the 1980s and include examples discussed above. The wateriness of Venice is hard to distinguish from de Kooning’s response to life on Long Island. (Curators also mention his origins in Rotterdam, a city of canals and docks.) The abstracts of the early 1950s proved a great success, although connoisseurs considered that he was resting too heavily on the style of his friend Franz Kline, whose black-and-white canvases made a great impression on colleagues. The Spoleto drawings, raked with slashing marks, are heirs to paintings such as Door to the River (1960), exhibited in Venice. Other contain figures – one shows figures at a keyboard, inspired by the musical performance that de Kooning was attending when drawing – and that has a cartoonish quality. (I am reminded a little of Charles Bukowski’s drawings.)

The Venetian painting method, devised around 1500-5 – which was to draw forms in paint on canvas, rather than transferring a precise underdrawing, then continue painting from that – was the modern method subscribed to by de Kooning. His reliance on colour over drawing – though not excluding the importance of drawing as the basis for painting as well as a discipline in itself – is also Venetian in character. His tall paintings of women of the 1960s are of figures on a beach or a bed or bathing, mainly. They are lush and frankly sexual, delighting in slippery flesh, the brush caressing the body like a hand or tongue. They lack the totemic character of the first Women series. Those earlier ones were more aggressive. Their imposing figures, rigid outlines, indomitable mouths and stark eyes made them fearsome goddesses; the later series are of women, dangerous to be sure but also enticing and accessible in the way the earlier ones were not.

Drawings of feet on one sheet appear similar to Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings. Charcoals of figures include a crucifixion. de Kooning stated that he never had the capacity to sustain the emotional engagement for such a gruelling subject in paint; a drawing made over a short time allowed such an engagement. It is not a masterpiece but it seems de Kooning’s mature (post-mid-1940s) style did not allow for the creation of paintings that require emotionally involved and coolly articulated expression into which domain crucifixions fall. I question the inclusion of some of the Ribbon paintings from the 1980s, which are related to the abstracts of the 1970s, but do not seem to have any relevance to Italy.

The exhibition contains a wide selection of his bronzes, which are some of the artist’s most extraordinary creations. These putty-like figures are palpably “human clay”, that were kneaded like dough; the manipulation by fingers implies the charge of the deity’s power of creation of Adam, the first man. The marks make the figures vulnerable. de Kooning defied convention by working in very wet clay, allowing him to make brush-like marks on the sculptures with gloved hands. Caught in a moment of becoming, de Kooning’s bronze figures seem as though they could be broken or remade as they could stay in their present state – touchingly vulnerable in their inchoate state. They are as provisional as his painted figures, slipping and shimmering as the paint around them is arrested at a moment of near arbitrary stasis.

Richard Wollheim well described the painted figures of de Kooning in a text that could be applied to his sculptures. “The sensations that de Kooning cultivates are […] the most fundamental in our repertoire. They are those sensations which give us our first access to the external world, and they also, as they repeat themselves, bind us forever to the elementary forms of pleasure into which they initiated us […] sucking, touching, biting, excreting, retaining, smearing, sniffing, swallowing, gurgling, stroking, wetting. And these pictures […] contain a further reminder. They remind us that, in their earliest occurrence, these experiences invariably posed a threat. Heavily charged with excitation, they threaten to overwhelm the fragile barriers of the mind that contained them, and to swamp the immature, precarious self.”[i]

The faces of the figures are grotesque. Mouths are literal slashes and eyes bulge like scoops of ice cream. They tremble on the verge of disintegration but are resolutely substantial. The horror of the informe pushes us to reject them as beings akin to us; the horror of their terrible, abnormal, exaggerated bodies repels our empathetic identification with them. They do not seem quite caricature because the presence of crude matter impinges on us so insistently that it militates against pithiness. (In the same way that a cadaver seems to have qualities a living body does not and vice versa.) The violence of the knife, gouge and wire loop is preserved in the clay forms, implying the violence of human suffering and the trauma of birth. Pitiful, pathetic and profoundly human, they are some of the most remarkable of all sculptures of the figure. It is shocking how comprehensible they are to us, despite their crude nature and semi-abstract state. They are ugly too, in the way that people can be ugly. The pucker of cellulite, the furrow of sagging flesh, the extrusions of warts, tumours and tufts of hair are all evoked by the clay reproduced in bronze. It makes no difference that the exact analogies come about through accident or non-intentionally descriptive results. Of course, the basic features are intended but rich with unintended descriptions. De Kooning’s adroitness as an artist allows the expression to come through without him having to literally describe. He simply needed to recognise what he had done and stop the process there.

De Kooning’s production of sculpture is restricted a limited period, lasting from 1969 to 1974. He never returned to the medium after then. The inclusion of bronzes by Rodin (Iris), Rosso and Giacometti makes sense, although the catalogue writers point out that de Kooning’s sculptures share few characteristics with Giacometti, other than their overall undulating surface. Overall the catalogue essays are enlightening and perceptive. Photographs show de Kooning in Italy and installation views of his exhibitions in Italy. It is an overall handsome production.

As I have contended for many years, Bacon abandoned his ideas of sculpture (which he mooted in interviews and even began preparing for) once he became aware of de Kooning’s sculptures. Either Bacon heard of them through David Sylvester or saw them published. Moore, who knew Bacon and Sylvester, may have discussed de Kooning’s sculpture about this time. Once Bacon was aware of the pieces, it seems likely he concluded he could not better de Kooning or did not want his sculptures to be made in rivalry with de Kooning’s. By this time, critics had already compared the two modern masters (nearly contemporaneous in age) in print and Bacon may have had an aversion to fuelling what would be seen as a rivalry between them.

The exhibition curation convincingly puts the case that Italian art, from Giotto up to de Kooning’s Italian contemporaries exerted influence over de Kooning’s thinking to varying degrees. It is indisputable that the experience of modelling clay in Rome opened up the field of sculpture to de Kooning. This exhibition (and the catalogue) will provide much to think about and, for appreciators of de Kooning’s art, a greater understanding of his output, especially the sculptures.

Gary Garrels, Mario Codognato, et al., Willem de Kooning and Italy, Willem de Kooning Foundation, 3 May 2024, hardback, 256pp, 200 col. illus. €50 (Italian version available)

[i] Wollheim, 1987, quoted p. 37

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Willem De Kooning and Italy

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