ART REVIEW : New World Ardor : Willem de Kooning’s sensual works confirm his place as a great European modernist refracted through an American prism

WASHINGTON — The magnificent retrospective of Willem de Kooning’s paintings at the National Gallery of Art throws the artist’s breathtaking achievement into high relief. More than ever, he is confirmed as the last great exemplar of a European tradition of modern art, as altered and transmogrified by his loving encounter with his adopted home.

De Kooning, a Dutch emigre to the United States, transformed Parisian Cubism and European Expressionism, infusing them with a scale and a temperament distinctly American and particular to New York. Cubism and Expressionism were writ large, in dazzlingly complex images of women begun circa 1949 and in luxurious, landscape-inspired abstractions that followed half a dozen years later.

The retrospective, which brings together 76 paintings on canvas, paper and board, begins in 1938 with De Kooning’s peculiar figure studies of men and women in indeterminate interiors. They seem to merge an affection for the “little brown paintings” of Dutch old masters with a thoroughly modern, specifically Cubist interest in constantly shifting points of view. Together, these impulses are inflected by the salutary influence of painter Arshile Gorky, his great friend, mentor and fellow immigrant (from Armenia).

The show concludes in 1986 with the big canvases of loose, light-filled, open interlaces of color darting through fields of tinted white. The best of them rank as an astonishing coda to an already astonishing career.

The museum has mounted the retrospective on the occasion of De Kooning’s 90th birthday; he was born in Rotterdam on April 24, 1904, came to the United States illegally in 1926 and stopped painting in the late 1980s, when the debilitating effects of Alzheimer’s disease ended his artistic life. National Gallery curator Marla Prather, English critic and historian David Sylvester and Nicholas Serota, director of London’s Tate Gallery, have assembled a nearly flawless array of paintings to tell their tale.

That rarely flagging level of quality is crucial, because the last opportunity to survey De Kooning’s work--a 1983 retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art--could be described most charitably as erratic in the loans that were secured. With few notable exceptions, topped by the missing “Pink Angels” from circa 1945, all the pivotal paintings are in Washington. As a result, it’s easy to follow the internal trajectory of De Kooning’s art.

The most important insight De Kooning took from Cubism was his sensual articulation of the surface of a painting as a bodily metaphor. The Cubist structure on which the great, rambunctious “Woman” paintings rely is harnessed by De Kooning as a way to unfold the body in keeping with the two-dimensional space of painting. He had mastered the device in the vigorous, mural-like abstraction “Excavation,” painted for the 1950 Venice Biennale and completed while he was struggling with the newer figure paintings.

Formally, in the show’s group of 14 paintings dating from 1949 to 1955, the women are squared off, flattened out, interlocked with the surrounding environment. Raucous, funny, flirtatious and aggressive, they embody the mesmerizing fierceness of flesh and blood.

In these wildly inventive pictures, De Kooning made the painterly surface of his canvas or paper coincident with, and inseparable from, the bodily surface of the image. A pictorial surface loaded with paint is announced as the painting’s skin, and further likened to human flesh. The problem for De Kooning, as an artist, was how to make that dead flesh live, in all its splendid emotional, physical and psychological variety.

This Expressionist dimension of his work parallels a more restrained postwar tradition of abstract painting, exemplified by artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin and Brice Marden. They, too, developed a bodily metaphor for art, in which a painting’s structural skeleton and surface skin are poetically articulated.

What differs is their temperament. Kelly and his compatriots coolly offered canvases as perceptual equivalents to the body of the viewer standing before them. De Kooning did, too, but he turned it into a visceral encounter: You find yourself wanting to touch, to inhale, to engorge yourself with his paint.

De Kooning used a variety of tricks to pump up the sensuously inviting tactility of his surfaces, including his famous wet-on-wet technique of mixing salad oil in the pigment, in order to make it slithery, fluid and receptive to sustained periods of work. It didn’t dry out fast.

As he worked he would repeatedly scrape down the surface, leaving layered smears and traces of underpaint to show through, like insistent memories of past encounters piling up one atop the other. His paintings can look slatternly, as if they’ve been around.

When engrossed by that gorgeously seductive dynamic, the viewer may easily forget the complicated art scene De Kooning worked in. He had been living in New York for about a decade when the influx of European modern artists fleeing Hitler arrived, and after World War II he naturally stayed. (He still wasn’t a citizen and wouldn’t become one until 1962, but he considered himself an American nonetheless.) The volatile avant-garde context that marked the immediate postwar years in Manhattan was small, cliquish and without much public following. But as a devastated Europe lay in ruins, the sense of needing to pick up art’s fallen torch was strong.

Abstract Expressionism was thus tinctured with a missionary aura. De Kooning, the European expatriate who had worked his way across the Atlantic and then jumped ship when docked at Newport News, Va., was in part a bridge between the Old World and the New. In many ways his work embodied the span.

He and other Abstract Expressionists’ brand of painting had been important in setting a stage of cultural seriousness within the otherwise largely provincial art life of the United States. Remember, though, that they were at the center of that local maelstrom for only slightly more than a decade, when the big artistic tsunami of the early 1960s broke. By 1964, the explosive arrival of Pop, Minimal and Conceptual art had changed just about everything.

Among the most telling alterations was the loosening of the exclusive grip of the New York School on claims to artistic significance. At the time, nearly half of De Kooning’s working life as an artist was still ahead.

The National Gallery show demonstrates how De Kooning’s art seriously wobbled in the wake of the artistic watershed that he had helped to foster--and that finally overtook him. By the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s, his painting goes slack for the first time. You feel him stumbling, as if in search of his sea legs. He reiterates the earlier themes of women and gestural landscape, often melding the two in playfully insouciant ways, but his pictures feel distracted.

Then, as if De Kooning had in fact been regrouping his energies, the paintings take off for the stratosphere again: A lush room of seven abstractions all dating from 1977-78 is among the most beautiful in the show. Never has paint as a dumb, mysteriously sensuous material looked more viscerally inviting than here.

The National Gallery has done a remarkably good job of laying out this exciting terrain, especially in the big, sweeping middle of the presentation. Just once at the beginning and once at the end is the exhibition tripped up.

At the start a serious fault is the absence of “Pink Angels,” a smallish painting inspired by Picasso but marked by a voluptuous, transparent linearity wholly De Kooning’s own. Without it, you just can’t make the leap from the show’s first room, with its six relatively conventional pink and ochre studies of male and female figures, to the startling second room, filled with six exciting black paintings, through which whiplash lines of white create a magical interpenetration of crystalline and biomorphic shapes. With these, De Kooning was on his way.

Despite numerous entreaties, according to the National Gallery, Los Angeles collector Frederick Weisman simply would not lend “Pink Angels,” which hangs in the Holmby Hills mansion he has made plans to open as a house museum. It’s too bad, since the picture’s significance to De Kooning’s oeuvre is accurately described by David Sylvester in the retrospective’s catalogue as “probably the single most decisive turning point in a career full of twists and turns.”

The second problem is the final room. In the 1980s--and in his increasingly debilitated dotage--De Kooning was still enthralled with the soul-shattering, life-altering possibilities for visual pleasure in painting. But the eight selected canvases are uneven at best. Especially on the heels of the knockout gallery of gorgeous pictures from 1977-78 that immediately precedes it, the erratic last room inappropriately sends you out the door with a few doubts about the claims that have been made for De Kooning’s last works.

Despite these small deficiencies, the retrospective remains a superlative achievement. What’s extraordinary is the way two central and related features of De Kooning’s art get pressed upon our current consciousness.

One concerns the current preoccupation among scores of significant artists with the cultural politics of the human body. The other concerns the potential role of seductive visual knowledge amid the hectoring descriptive content of so much art today.

The exhibition is important to see now because it sets up an extravagant argument in favor of a kind of visual knowledge often erroneously dismissed as irrelevant today, but nonetheless being championed by many of our most compelling younger artists. De Kooning at 90 stands as a gorgeously convincing precedent.

* “Willem de Kooning: Paintings,” National Gallery of Art, 4th Street at Constitution Avenue N.W., Washington, D.C., (202) 737-4215. Daily through Sept. 5. The show will travel to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (Oct. 11-Jan. 8) and London’s Tate Gallery (Feb. 16-May 7).