Art: Painting's Vocabulary Builder

A founder of abstract expressionism honored at the Whitney

Willem de Kooning will be 80 in April. To have reached such an age, still bravely painting, is to have outlived all one's enemies and most of one's friends; by now his reputation can hardly be diminished, which may be why the Whitney Museum has had no choice but to enlarge it a little more. If de Kooning is not quite an American Picasso, at least he has been in every art history book, and in the mind of every artist, for the past 30 years. His career started late—he did not even have a one-man show until he was 43—but it proved durable. So although the exhibition of more than 250 of his paintings, drawings and bronzes that opened in December at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art is the largest de Kooning retrospective ever held (it will travel to Berlin and Paris), it is still a provisional report.

As a retrospective, this show is by no means "definitive." Quite a few key works are absent. The Art Institute of Chicago refused to lend Excavation, 1950, the biggest and most ambitious of de Kooning's biomorphic abstractions, while from the celebrated Women series of the early '50s, those shark-grinning popsies before whose dumpy and threatening torsos so much critical rhapsody has been laid, three of the main paintings (owned by Australia, Iran and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City) are missing. Nor do we get to see Police Gazette, 1954-55, or Gotham News, 1955-56, the impacted, jostling city paintings that initiated de Kooning's bravura landscapes of the late '50s. With these and other gaps, one gets a less than full picture of the artist at his best, up to his 60th year. By the time the show gets to Europe and other early works have dropped out, it will be patchier still; a pity, since the Whitney plainly wants the show to revise art history with a bang, installing de Kooning in Pollock's place as the central hero of abstract expressionism.

"More than any other American artist of the 20th century," writes its director, Tom Armstrong, in the catalogue, "Willem de Kooning has added to the vocabulary of painting, altered the perception of what painting represents." Jorn Merkert's catalogue essay asserts that de Kooning "played perhaps the decisive role" in the development of abstract expressionism (notwithstanding de Kooning's own generous tribute to Pollock as the one who "broke the ice"). The purpose of canonization is well in hand; once again—though one must except Curator Paul Cummings' measured and enlightening essay on de Kooning's drawings—the work of a distinguished artist becomes a pedestal for the display of swollen claims.

Perhaps it is not in the holiday spirit to feel that this oeuvre has any faults or limitations at all. But it does; what serious painter's does not? Their nature can be assessed by comparing the "early" with the "late" de Kooning. When the slight, pale Dutch youth smuggled himself into America without proper papers in 1926, he brought with him something that very few of his colleagues in the New York School of the '40s and '50s would turn out to have: a thorough, guild-based art training that centered on formal drawing of the figure.