ART: Seeing the Face in the Fire

Willem de Kooning, whom many would call America's greatest living painter, was 43 when he had his first one-man show and today, at 90, with his painting career finished by senility, he has still not had an adequate museum retrospective. The last attempt at such a show was staged at the Whitney Museum in New York City 10 years ago. It was a bust because so many of De Kooning's key paintings from the '40s and '50s were not lent. The show titled "Willem de Kooning Paintings," which opened this month at the National Gallery in Washington -- it will go to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in October, and later to the Tate Gallery in London -- is not a real retrospective either. It leaves out both the worst of De Kooning, his sculpture, and some of the best, his drawings. But it does have quite a few of the paintings that were missing from the effort 10 years ago and is certainly a must-see for that reason.

De Kooning is probably the most libidinal painter America has ever had. One sees him as the consummate anti-Duchamp, a permanent relief from over- theorized art, a man so in touch with the sources of his pictorial pleasure (the body of paint and the body of the world) that he can render you dizzy with exhilaration. This isn't dumbness but a particular form of sensory intelligence that has always been rare in American art and came, in this case, from outside it. De Kooning arrived in the U.S. as an illegal immigrant from Rotterdam in 1926. He was a gifted draftsman who had already achieved a high level of academic training. But he gradually learned to connect that to a modernist syntax, fusing the line of Ingres and the fragmentation of the antique torso to 1930s Picasso and his American derivatives like Arshile Gorky. Seated Figure (Classic Male), 1940, shows the early stage of this process to perfection. The forms through which De Kooning reached abstraction were always connected to an earlier kind of abstraction, that of academic drawing.

If one were forced to pick the best single picture De Kooning ever painted, it would probably have to be Excavation, 1950: that tangled, not-quite monochrome, dirty-cream image of -- what? Bodies is the short answer: every one of the countless forms that seem embedded in the paint, jostling and slipping against one another in a tempo that seems to get faster toward the corners, can be read as an elbow, a thigh, a buttock, but never quite literally. There is even a set of floating teeth -- the dentures the Women would soon be sporting.

De Kooning's characteristically hooked, recurving line takes on an invigorating speed, charging and skidding through the dense paint, slits open with the promise of spatial depth, only to shut again. The only relief from the close churning of forms is a curious "window" at the middle of the painting -- red, white and blue -- that looks like a blurred American flag. The work's space is not deep, as the title might suggest, but shallow, like a bas-relief. You keep expecting the image to fly apart into formal incoherence, but it never does: it has the kind of control you see in great drivers or skaters, a supple rigor that seems to exist only on the edge of its own dissolution. One is tempted to say that Excavation is the last great Cubist painting, 30 years after Cubism petered out. All of De Kooning's relation to Picasso is in it.