ART: Seeing the Face in the Fire

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By the late 1950s, De Kooning was surrounded by imitators; there was a "look," a gestural rhetoric fatally easy to mimic, that they got from him and reduced to parody. (The artists who would really make something of his legacy were not in New York but in California: Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud.) Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns reacted against him, sons against the parent; but Rauschenberg's now classic Oedipal gesture of rubbing out a De Kooning drawing could not erase the obvious fact that the paint in his combine-pictures came straight out of the older Dutch master, drips, clots and all.

Such things make an artist feel old. As his followers were becoming more prominent, De Kooning was easing himself out of Manhattan, spending more and more time on the South Fork of Long Island. The flat potato fields, beaches and glittering air of that tongue of land must often have reminded him of the Dutch seacoast, but what mattered most to his paintings in the late '50s was the experience of getting there, being driven up Route 495 -- fast movement through unscrolling American highway space. Hence the road images of 1957-1958, in which the full-reach, broad-brush speed of the paint becomes a headlong road movie, analogous to Jack Kerouac's writing (though without its hectoring blither) or the photographs of De Kooning's friend Robert Frank. See America now! And you do -- in abstraction; you feel its rush and tonic vitality in the toppling blue strokes of Ruth's Zowie, 1957, which echo Franz Kline's big-girder structures but move them into a pastoral context.

What De Kooning found at the end of this highway, however, when he moved permanently to Long Island in 1963, was mostly suds and mayonnaise. The long $ series of pink squidgy pictures -- landscapes, nudes splayed like frogs in memory of Dubuffet, and female clam diggers -- that issued from his studio over the next 15 years was lush and trivial. The drawing is submerged in weak, declamatory, wambling brushstrokes; the color -- mostly pink -- is bright and boring. Yet you could never write De Kooning off. He came back in the late '70s with some big, rapturously congested landscape-body images with a deeper tonal structure that, though they do not support the comparisons to late Monet, Renoir, Bonnard "and, of course, Titian" that David Sylvester makes in his catalog essay, certainly confirm that the movement of De Kooning's talent was not on-off, but ebb and flow.

Then came the thin, pale, intensely lyrical paintings of the early '80s, which spin away the congestion altogether, and for a few years recapitulate the graphic intensity of his work in the 1940s, but in terms of an almost Chinese delicacy, in the colors of famille-rose porcelain. Looking at them is like seeing an old man's veins through his skin: the abiding network of the style is set forth, but in its last physical form.