'Read no history: nothing but biography," 19th-century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli once said, "for that is life without theory." The quotation delivers the essence of what is great about the new biography of the famous Dutch-born American painter Willem de Kooning.
Written by New York magazine art critic Mark Stevens and his editor/journalist wife Annalyn Swan, de Kooning: An American Master weighs in at 752 pages, but its silky flow relieves any sense of heavy sledding. Richly loaded with detail, it carries the resonance of its 10-year gestation with remarkable grace.
As they described their process to me a few weeks ago in Toronto, Stevens and Swan seemed every bit the proud parents. In preparing for the writing, they conducted more than 200 interviews, talking to anyone they could find who knew de Kooning in Europe or America. The transcripts of those interviews, they say, now stand in stacks in their west-side New York apartment, alongside the piles of revised manuscripts (eight drafts in all) that led to their final product.
It was the death of the artist's controlling widow, Elaine, in 1989, that suddenly made possible a free and untrammelled account of the artist's life, and when Random House came calling in the early 1990s, the offer was irresistible. Along the way, they say, there have been many moments of epiphany.
"We were walking along in Chelsea back in the late nineties and we happened to walk by a window with one of his great, luscious paintings in it," recalls Swan in her mild Southern drawl. (She grew up in Biloxi, Miss.) "It was one of the paintings from the seventies where the paint is mixed with safflower oil, and it had that bravura, whiplash brushstroke. We looked at it and we just thought: Here's our guy."
The book is a wild ride. De Kooning began his life in Rotterdam in 1904, and his early years were racked with poverty and instability. His mother, Cornelia, was a fierce woman with a tempestuous temper who tangled often with her son. (She was a barkeeper in the working-class quarter of the city.) Swan and Stevens trace the young artist's early rise through Rotterdam's graphic art, decorating and design houses, and his fortuitous enrolment at the Academie van Beeldende Kunsten en Technische Wetenschappen, where he learned the art of drawing, the mainstay of his artistic practice throughout his life.
The authors write compellingly about the thriving Dutch seaport, and the constant reminders it offered of a world beyond. De Kooning was not immune to the call, and in 1926 -- deeply enamoured of cowboys and Indians, Hollywood glamour and hot jazz -- he stowed away on a British freighter bound for Newport News, Va. Ultimately, he made his way to the immigrant Dutch community in Hoboken, N.J., where he worked as a sign painter. From there, he soon made the jump to Manhattan.
We move through the years that follow: his rise from abject poverty and obscurity to early recognition by his peers (de Kooning became a sort of underground sensation among the downtown painters), to the first breakthrough show at the Egan Gallery in 1948. We witness, too, the tragic arc of his falling spirits once success came, dragged down with alcohol and despair as his stellar rise attracted the inevitable pack of jackal detractors.
A spectacular array of characters are brought to life in these pages: the artists Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline; the collector and socialite Peggy Guggenheim; the critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg; and dozens of other denizens of the Cedar Tavern. And then, of course, there were the women.
Like Picasso, de Kooning was a devastating charmer, and there is something quite extraordinary about the range of his amours. There's the vaudeville tightrope walker Nini Diaz; the soulful and devoted Joan Ward (a talented commercial illustrator with whom he had a daughter, Lisa); the voluptuous, Liz Taylor look-alike Ruth Kligman (she was Pollock's lover, and was in the car with him the night he died in the fateful automobile crash, branded the "death-car girl" by the poet Frank O'Hara); the dancer Susan Brockman; the "dark and almond-eyed" Houston socialite Emilie Kilgore; and, presiding over it all, the indomitable Elaine. These were women whose lives had been turned upside down, yet they retained their essential loyalty to the man they had loved. It says a lot.
His legal wife and a fellow artist Elaine (née Fried) lived with de Kooning only briefly after their marriage in 1943, but she never yielded her crown to the throng of contenders, gaily observing the parade of besotted womankind with a cigarette poised in one hand, a cocktail in the other, and an inscrutable, wickedly self-satisfied smile on her lips. (Swan and Stevens admit they differed on their interpretation of Elaine. "Annalyn was a lot harder on her," Stevens said when we met, a remark that Swan responded to with an amused "men are such suckers" roll of the eyes.)
This epic narrative is propelled by a few, well-delineated themes.
First: The authors see de Kooning as always the immigrant, forging a path in his new world, forever adrift and unstable. His compositions always threaten to fall apart, they argue, reflecting a consciousness that is always roving, never at rest between abstraction and representation, constitutionally resistant to resolution. Even de Kooning's signature brushstrokes hook back upon themselves in gestures of doubt and equivocation.
Second: Swan and Stevens position de Kooning as the last great painter in the European classical tradition, an heir to the rapturous, fleshy effulgence of Rubens, with a kindred Flemish love of the earthy and sensual. "This is not a conceptually driven project, not an abstract consideration of painting in modern culture," Stevens said to me. "He is on the same tarmac as Giotto."
In de Kooning's hands, unlike Rubens's, the figure of the woman takes on a terrifying, manic intensity, her teeth flashing (a few times in the fifties he cut out cover-girl smiles from magazine ads and incorporated them into his pictures). Her body is dismembered and splayed out, vibrant and raw before the probing eye of the artist, an eye invested, always, with a fervent sense of touch.
Reading through the pages, you develop a keen sense of de Kooning the man, but the book also offers a riveting history lesson in the developments in American art from the 1930s through the 1980s, a lesson that we imbibe not through the rehashing of theory but through tales of barroom fights, the setting and resetting of personal allegiances, and the accidents of fate. In one magical episode, the authors deliver us into the 1953 studio visit by the young Robert Rauschenberg, a fateful day on which the fledgling pop artist asked the older master for a drawing to erase. The resulting work, Erased de Kooning, would become one of Rauschenberg's most brilliant creations, an Oedipal father-slaying that signified the changing tides of art from the emotion and sensation of abstract expressionism to the coolness of pop and conceptual art.
Ten years later, with his critical acclaim fading as fashions in the art world shifted, we watch de Kooning withdraw from the New York art scene to an increasingly solitary life in the Springs, Long Island (the working-class part of East Hampton), where he built his dream studio like a great white ship floating amid the scrubby pines, and spent hours bicycling beside the sea and soaking up the North Atlantic light.
Throughout, Swan and Stevens balance the personal biography with a deft reading of the paintings and the later sculptures, always leaving interpretive room for us to enter. There's no dime-store emotion here.
The treatment of de Kooning's slide into dementia, for example, is handled with great firmness and lack of maudlin sentiment, although the portrait they paint is deeply moving. When we read of his death at the end, it has all the abrupt finality of a bug hitting a windscreen -- a mute, stunned holding back of language that speaks more eloquently of death than verbiage ever could.
Ultimately, the book proceeds in the faith that the real drama is to be excavated from the paint itself. Life is what happened to de Kooning around the tattered edges of a compulsion to leave his mark, in every sense of the word. "In biography, you have to lay out the facts and not advance the moral of the story," says Stevens. "This is a literary genre; a biography must have a narrative drive. But there can be a vulgar tendency to reduce the art to the life. You have to allow for the space between the art and the life. After all, a lot of people have a lousy childhood and they don't turn into de Kooning. You have to point to that mystery."