ART: Seeing the Face in the Fire

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Marla Prather's catalog essay provides the intriguing gloss that the genesis of Excavation began with a black-and-white film, Bitter Rice, a classic of Italian neorealist cinema, starring Silvana Mangano as a rice gatherer in the Po Delta; evidently De Kooning "responded" (as what red-blooded Dutch- American artist of 46 might not?) to a sequence of peasant women in tight shorts mud-wrestling in the paddies. If true, this tale illustrates clearly how De Kooning never conceived of painting as a purely Apollonian art: fragments of pop culture -- movies, ads, the immense bric-a-brac of the American desire industry -- were always sailing into his images and sticking there, like bugs on a windshield.

The extreme "reductionist" view of De Kooning's career, held by Clement Greenberg and maintained by some critics today, is that after 1950 it went kerflooie. Like Western civilization itself, as his friend and chief critical promoter Harold Rosenberg sardonically remarked, De Kooning was always in decline. This katabasis is supposed to have begun in the early '50s, with the Women series. Greenberg is said to have opined to De Kooning that at this juncture in history (meaning 40 years ago), you can't paint a human face. Sure, said the painter, and you can't not paint one either -- meaning, by this laconic koan, that no matter how abstract you get, people will always tend to read images in the work, like seeing faces in the fire. So why not come right out with the figure? At least it might save the abstractions from gliding into decoration, losing their crankiness and urgency, which was, indeed, what New York abstract painting did when lyric acrylic on unprimed duck became all the rage in the 1960s.

Abstract Expressionism -- in the hands of its two masters, Pollock and De Kooning, at least -- had a way of disappointing the critics who wanted it to be more abstract than it was. Just as Pollock's all-over paintings wouldn't be so great if they weren't landscapes, full of wind and weather, light and pollen, so De Kooning's work benefited from the grand ghosts of Dutch baroque figure painting, who kept jolting the artist's elbow.

* The pupils of Woman I, 1950-1952, glare at you like a pair of black head lamps. She has the worst overbite in all of Western art. She looks like a school matron, seen in a bad dream, imposing and commonplace, and full of a power that flows from the slashing brushstrokes into the body. De Kooning -- the "slipping glimpser," as he called himself, open to a constant stream of momentary impressions -- loved contradictory vernaculars, visual slang that collided with the huge amount of high-art language that he had internalized since his student days in the Dutch academy. Smiles from Camel ads; shoulders from Ingres; pinup girls and Raphael's The School of Athens; high and low, everywhere. It was his mode of reception, never intellectualized but often extremely funny.