Art: Willem the Walloper

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Willem de Kooning is the sort of painter who gives most people a pain: superficially his pictures look like scribbles any kid could do. They are not really like that at all; the difference between De Kooning's work and mere doodling is enough to make him one of America's liveliest advance-guard artists. Despite his reputation and the fact he is all of 47, De Kooning has had only two one-man shows; the second opened in a Manhattan gallery last week. "I haven't felt ready for exhibitions," he explains, "and I'm not particularly happy about this one. I'm still working out of doubt."

Doubtful or not, De Kooning wallops into each canvas with a will, drawing lines that resemble streams of ticker tape on the wind, whipped free one instant, snarled the next, and punctuated with blobs and smears which break the canvas into arcs, tunnels, humps and skies of space. Weak in color, his paintings are always original and often elegant in composition. Like the finest Chinese brush drawings, they have an air of being dashed off, and they are. To give his work the spontaneous quality, De Kooning does it fast, destroys hundreds of failures.

Raised in Rotterdam, De Kooning left school at twelve, worked as sign painter and house painter while studying at Rotterdam's art academy at night: "I met a lot of fellows and we became a little like bohemians. We tried to paint like the impressionists. Some of us imitated Mondrian, too, but we didn't really get it very good." At 21, De Kooning came to the U.S., knowing only one word of English: "Yes." He got a job as a commercial artist, visited the art galleries in his lunch hours and painted by himself on Sundays : "I was influenced by lots of artists. If you paint your whole life, you take that for granted, and after a while all kinds of painting become just painting for you—abstract or otherwise."

A year on the WPA Federal Art Project freed De Kooning from commercial work, made him resolve to paint fulltime. "People have helped me, and I more or less made out. You don't really go hungry —that's the funny thing." Married to an art critic, he now teaches at the Yale School of the Fine Arts a day and a half a week, paints in his Manhattan studio the other days. He is quite unimpressed by the fame his paintings have begun to gain. "Nothing is positive about art," he says, "except that it is a word."