“Maybe I was stuck to a certain extent; I couldn’t go on. And [the figure] did one thing for me: it eliminated composition, arrangement, relationships, light—all this silly talk about line, color, and form, you know—because that was the thing I wanted to get hold of.” —Willem de Kooning, 1963

For many, his works are confrontational, provocative, aggressive, disturbing and even frightening. Yet below the vicious and vigorous black strokes that scar the surface of his work, Willem de Kooning’s art is a rigorous redefinition of form, a compelling and captivating investigation of the process of visual expression.

Dutch-born artist Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), throughout his prolific career as a prominent member of the New York School painters, left an indelible mark on painting. His perpetual investigation of the relation between figuration and abstraction, as manifest in the female form, led him to paint innovative and groundbreaking images with lasting potency, first among these being “Woman I.”

De Kooning’s works on paper from 1938 to 1955, in which he represents the female form in varying states of abstraction, comprise the extensive exhibition now open at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art. This collection of the artist’s works is an invaluable glimpse at the deeply personal process of thinking, creating, and discovery that lies at the core of de Kooning’s legacy. With each drawing and oil sketch, a new artistic progression in the continuous struggle to realize and convey the figure is revealed to the viewer.

The show offers a thorough look at both refined artistic successes and examples of a more casual working out of visual problems on paper. The pieces displayed are best characterized by an inherent tension. They vibrate with energy and visual force as they reveal the artist’s struggles to eliminate boundaries between drawing and painting, while probing figurative elements for their fundamental abstract forms. They read as transparent entries in the diary of the mind: betraying clearly on the surface the profound influences of artists such as Picasso and Gorky on de Kooning’s development.

Of course, in addition to its revelatory value as the residual evidence of a ‘genius’ at work, this exhibit includes works of astounding visual and artistic expression—captivating, as well, for the mere, yet sublime, settling of pigment on the paper’s surface. The images range from obscure compositions to variations of the quintessential de Kooning women.

The studies for paintings and drawings of the female nude are gripping. The often brutally worked surfaces of his figure studies create ambiguities of meaning, questions to which an answer would only serve as insufficient or limiting to the art. Suggesting both volume and flatness, spontaneity and careful correction, clarity and doubt, sexuality and violence, eros and thanatos, his women resolutely occupy their surface and the viewer’s attention. His mark unsettles the viewer, delays the eye and delights the mind.

visual arts

Willem de Kooning: Tracing the Figure

Museum of Contemporary Art

Los Angeles

Through Apr. 28