For anyone who has been around the New York art world as long as I have,
the large exhibition of portraits by Elaine de Kooning (1918-1989) that is
currently on view in the capacious second-floor galleries at
Salander-O’Reilly is bound to stir a great many memories. Not only
have most of the painter’s subjects departed this world–among
them, Willem de Kooning, Edwin Denby, Fairfield Porter, Aristodemos Kaldis,
Harold Rosenberg, Tom Hess, Gandy Brodie and Charlie Egan–but the very
world they inhabited is now so remote from ours that it seems at times to
belong to a different civilization. What Henry James once called “the
landscape of life” has been altered beyond recognition or reclaim.
It is not only the artist’s subjects, moreover, that evoke a time
and place and spirit that are now lost to us. The freewheeling painterly
manner which Elaine de Kooning adopted for the most ambitious of her
portraits in the 1950′s, 60′s and 70′s similarly recalls a
period, and indeed a period style, as fixed in its time-bound orthodoxies
as the art of the Pre-Raphaelites. Unlike the latter, however, hers was a
style that favored the utmost in spontaneity and improvisation and spurned
anything remotely suggestive of finish or completion–in other words,
the style of second-generation Abstract Expressionism.
Critical opinion about the strengths and weaknesses of this style, which
is not to be confused with first-generation Abstract Expressionism of the
1940′s, varied a good deal when it was fashionable and has become even
more divided with the passage of time. In its day, there was a group of
writers in the circle of Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery who adored
second-generation Ab Ex, overpraised it, and remained blind to its
failures. Their view of its accomplishments is succinctly restated in the
catalogue of the current Portraits show by poet Bill Berkson, who
describes what he calls the “Tenth-Street touch” as “nervily
loose, sketchy, grooved, juicy to overflowing,” and then ruins his
case by going on to claim that it was a “period style that looked
then, as now, as admirable as any in the history books.” Which, if it
means anything, means that the “Tenth-Street touch” of
second-generation Ab Ex is as admirable as the painting of, say,
Velázquez or Goya or Corot, and that is something that nobody really
believes.
To the extent that Elaine de Kooning’s portraits succeeded at times
in overcoming the worst features of this period style is owing, I think, to
the respect she felt for her subjects. Her most accomplished portrait
paintings are almost invariably devoted to artists, writers and other
art-world figures whom she regarded as her peers. She clearly felt an
obligation to get her subjects right, to make something permanent of their
character or their sensibility or their way of being in the world. That was
obviously more important to her than a perfectly organized pictorial
composition, which was in any case severely frowned upon by the esthetic
orthodoxies of the period in which she produced most of the portraits in
this exhibition.
The earlier portrait drawings and small paintings in the show tell a
different story, of course. The line drawing of Arshile Gorky (circa 1943),
the two pencil portraits of Willem de Kooning (1939 and 1940) and the
pencil portrait of Edwin Denby (circa 1948) belong to the early years of
her marriage to de Kooning, whom she met in 1937 and married in 1943, and inevitably
reflect his strong influence. So does the marvelous little Self-
Portrait of 1944. These are executed in a more classical style than the
later work. So is the portrait of Charlie Egan (1946), the dealer
who gave de Kooning his first solo exhibition in 1948. They thus belong to
the pre-Ab Ex period of Elaine de Kooning’s artistic development.
In first-generation Abstract Expressionist painting, the whole question
of a subject or content for painting was endlessly debated and finally too
problematic to be resolved. In second-generation Ab Ex painting, however,
the “subject” became for some artists–Elaine de Kooning
among them–an absolute necessity. It became a means of imposing order
and coherence on a painterly practice that was threatening to become an end
in itself. It became a way of anchoring an otherwise unwieldy art in the
realm of immediate experience.
About this development there is a very illuminating passage in Mr.
Berkson’s essay in the Portraits catalogue: “The point for
many artists in the early 50′s was to make pictures at once containing
recognizable images that possessed the same surface energy as the abstract
paintings they admired.… In 1961, Fairfield Porter wrote that
Elaine’s ‘abstract paintings, for all their dashing
contemporaneity, do not seem to liberate her talent.… They simulate a
life not her own. It is as though she were making conversation.’
Portraiture, Porter went or to say, was ‘the kind of thing that
liberates her talent, what she uniquely can do.’”
This strikes me as absolutely right, but what was required in her case
was a subject that commanded something more personal than a merely social
response. The single biggest painting in the current Portraits show
is the Burghers of Amsterdam Avenue (1963), which is nearly 14 feet
wide and depicts nine young men who are not otherwise identified. It is not
a success. It is second-generation Ab Ex salon painting, in which heads and
limbs are left to shift for themselves in a cataract of painterly gestures.
She needed a single subject she regarded as a peer, and in a painting like
Gandy Brodie (1971), for example, she found one that was worthy of
her ambition.
But it is not only as painting that this Portraits exhibition is
of great interest, of course. It is also a remarkable documentary of a
bygone age that remains, even now, imperfectly understood. Elaine de
Kooning: Portraits remains on view at the Salander-O’Reilly
Galleries, 20 East 79th Street, through Jan. 30.
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