Merciful Madness in New York: The Gift Moves Around Chelsea

From the art farm in the Chelsea section of New York City, here is a dispatch.
If, according to Lewis Hyde's principles, some paintings give a gift while others scarf up energy from viewers, Willem de Kooning is Santa Claus. There is no other painter of the last century who brings such bountiful visions and hands them out all over the place. Witness "The Last Beginning," the exhibition of de Kooning's late paintings at Gagosian, to get the full effect. You won't find a barrier between the viewer and the paintings' power, nor will you be distracted by the iconography of everyday stuff. There's only the paint, the invisible brush, the invisible arm, and the informed mysteries of a man's mind when it paints.
Many of us haven't reconsidered Kooning's last paintings, made during the 1980s when he was a sharply diminished version of his younger self, since we originally decided they looked vacant and unrealized. It seemed a forgivable conclusion, since the man was supposed to have been senile when he made them. Interstitial spaces and wandering blue and red lines are a pretty poor substitute for rampaging globs of color, right? "Wrong," says Klaus Kertess's arrangement of these works within Gagosian's pristine space. The paintings can talk you into a new appreciation of their structure as you approach them across the glossy lake of the gallery floor—and approach them you must, as the room is a vast one. As you draw near to these mind-tangles, especially the blue on white ones (the paintings are untitled), the intricacies begin to unfold.
There's no way you can tell from a reproduction how considered the craft is in these late works, and this from a man who, we've been told, was two steps away from being a zombie. The intersection of forms in these paintings have been exquisitely managed. De Kooning has reworked his artless-looking gestures so you can't tell where they sit in space. Something that looks like a brushstroke might have been created by overlapping another area of paint. A line crossing another line might be nipped on both sides by feathered streaks of white paint, making it appear to arch over the surface like a bridge. These soaring, unkinked curves, drawn with a single swipe of a brush, might suggest the contours of women—a vocabulary he'd used for most of his productive life—or they might be free of any reference to animals, objects, the landscape. It doesn't feel within our purview to decide. The paintings pull you closer, make you ask yourself where the hell this man is going—we know perfectly well where he went—and after hours or days, you still won't know. And watch that blue. Prussian, right out of the tube, almost, yet in the corner of one of these later works, a rag of cobalt has worked its way into the line of sight and then back out. Sneaky or obvious, cagey or guileless, planned or pure, these moments will come back to you later, asking you what the essence of painting might be.
Careful, though. The other effect this show has is likely to be romantic, as it always is with me. To walk out on de Kooning, you have to break up with him, and I don't have the heart for it. And he's not going to throw anybody out.
Around the corner at Cheim and Read there's a theme show that raises the bar for any gallery that's given to this kind of activity. "I Am As You Will Be: The Skeleton in Art" is discerning, macabre, and witty: three qualities any show would do well to have.

The first clue that this gathering is a little different is the announcement, which features this 8 x 10 skull drawing by Alice Neel. Now, this is not the Alice we knew, the one in the spotted dress holding forth about the peccadilloes of her portrait-sitters. It's Alice scaring the burghers instead of tickling them, and she sets the stage for the show's other treats, like the monster shown below, by Louise Bourgeois.

"Arched Figure" is made of steel and human ribs, wrapped up in a sinister skin of used pantyhose. The photo is by Fred Gutzeit.

We also have great Munch and Ensor (thank goodness), as well as Paul Delvaux. The brilliant inclusion of a Robert Morris from '85–'86 serves as a reminder that the curator's job, in its best dimensions, includes some historical myth-preservation. I hadn't seen one of these ponderous framing jobs in a good long while, the ones where Morris apparently pressed or molded a sinister grab-bag of body parts into bas-relief and then molded them in lead and bronze. This time around, he used ribs (are these easy to get? there are lots of them in this room), skeletal hands, death masks, a skull crawling with maggots, and a few penises thrown in for good measure. The little encaustic painting living in the middle of this mess looked like it was having its own nightmare.
As a coda to all this revelatory amusement, I have to direct your attention to the Lee Krasner exhibit at Robert Miller. If you've been in the habit of thinking of Krasner as a sort of appendage to Pollack's genius, a tail to his dog, you can stop right now. This show comprises one year's worth of works on paper donated by a respected craftsman, and the paintings, each and all, are wonderful. They crowd in and jump on you. She has found the catalyst of painting in action, and mixes it at will.
I also sniffed around for Yun-Fei Ji at James Cohan gallery, though they're showing the fascinating but somewhat questionable Ingrid Calame at the moment. All I got of Yun-Fei was a look at his catalogue, but be advised: his "Last Days Before The Flood" has to be one of the swiftest jabs against official Chinese policy a contemporary artist can make. Until I can see it in person, I'll be moondogging it, waiting for his next appearance.

Comments

[J. D. King]

The other day I saw the Alice Neel documentary.

It's terrific!

[J. D. King]

The other day I saw the Alice Neel documentary.

It's terrific!