Dutch Treat

Correction Appended: September 22, 2011

Almost from the moment he broke out in the late 1940s, Willem de Kooning was one of the undisputed kings of Abstract Expressionism--a term that never sat right with him. "I'm not interested in abstracting or taking things out," he once said. "I paint this way because I can keep putting more and more things in: drama, anger, pain, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space." It's all there in the mighty new de Kooning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (organized by John Elderfield, the museum's chief curator emeritus). Look closely and you might even find the horse.

Born in 1904 in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam, de Kooning was 22 when he arrived in New York City as a stowaway aboard a British freighter. More than most of the other painters who would someday make up the American avant-garde, he had a solid training in academic drawing. So he set himself the task not only of absorbing the influence of Picasso's Cubism and Matisse's use of color as form but also of bringing the fluid lines of the old masters into the fragmented space of modernist painting. All that, plus he had to find a language of abstract forms that could still contain hints of the human body, the power of nature and the hectic pop plenitude of city life.

By 1945 he had arrived at his first masterpiece, Pink Angels, in which rosy globules--things that are "bodily" without being bodies--lunge across fields of yellow and ocher. Daring himself next to operate in a more shallow space, he was led into calligraphic black-and-white canvases like Painting--notes written in a mysterious hand. Excavation, probably his greatest picture, was a manifesto on the impossibility of fully decoupling the abstract from the concrete. Refashioning the segmented space of Cubism into an elastic field of elbowing forms, he planted peekaboo flashes everywhere of breasts, teeth and knees. A "slipping glimpser" is what de Kooning liked to call himself, a man grabbing for the rush of impressions that any moment sent his way. This great, tumultuous canvas is the last word in slipping glimpses.

Fame came calling--excited reviews, important group shows, his picture in Life magazine. And this was the very moment when he began work on the Woman paintings. Ferocious and crackling females with serious teeth, they confounded the same people who had just placed him at the forefront of the avant-garde. To the critic Clement Greenberg, the new work looked like a return to the discarded practices of figurative painting. But de Kooning knew that his women--emerging from a storm field of brushstrokes that both surrounded and penetrated them--blurred the line not only between figure and background but also between representation and abstraction.