De Kooning: An American Master
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Now, there has to be a better way to describe this moment without resorting to the language of a high school boy who’s discovered his girlfriend made out with some other guy at a party. Or does there? Throughout De Kooning–a comprehensive, dazzling study of both an enigmatic, fascinating man and a period of seismic cultural shifts–the authors run up against the intractable problem of how to chronicle a solitary, intuitive process guided by priorities and struggles that don’t lend themselves easily to words.
De Kooning’s life story is a biographer’s dream, full of tragedy, triumph, and salacious, page-turning detail. The son of a nagging brute of a mother, he fled the working-class gloom of Rotterdam for New York (via Hoboken) when he was 22. He was broke for decades yet died a millionaire. He devoted himself to a difficult, lonely career and ultimately came out on top. He was a notorious womanizer who used different doorbell codes to keep track of the flow of dames coming in and out of his apartment. Frantically in love with Elaine Fried, de Kooning married her in 1943. Though they led separate lives, with separate lovers, they could never quite get divorced, and in de Kooning’s 11th hour she returned to care for him until he died–though some claim she did so only to position herself well for the disposition of his estate. He was an alcoholic who spent the last decade of his life in a state of increasing dementia while opportunists went through his garbage looking for discarded drawings.
Stevens and Swan heroically attempt to describe the creation of Woman I, but those three years remain elusive, as do much of the inner workings of de Kooning’s mind. All of the contextual detail, description, lyrical interpretations, lectures, articles, and chronicles of conversations marshaled by the authors–none of it quite gets to the core. The fortress of fact protects the empty throne. And how can it be otherwise, when de Kooning offered so little about what drove him? Privately, he was quite expansive about himself, but not his art. To his sister he wrote, “I think that a lot of creative people never grow up. I am certain that a real man wouldn’t paint any pictures! Or wonder about the universe. Or believe in dreams. Or think that trees sometimes look at him.”
