In September of 1984, I spent a semester overseas in France to study art. I wandered into a printshop known as Studio 17, or Atelier 17, located just south of the gritty Latin quarter of Paris. I handed a letter of introduction to the founder of the place, Stanley William Hayter, hoping to get access. But before I could do that, he somewhat stiffly insisted that I had to complete an exercise under his instruction, spending three months developing an abstract image on a zinc etching plate. He guided me to draw lines on the plate that flowed freely and unconsciously through the movement of my whole arm. Lines pushed off the edges of the image, and I reset the composition by turning the plate on its side or upside down, resulting in a dynamic all-over composition. Little did I know that he was training me in automatism, a kind of abstract “stream of consciousness.” It was a technique that had been inspired by the experiments of the European Surrealist artists who had worked at Studio 17. This development was to leave its mark on the work of the American Abstract Expressionists of the1940s with the creation of what came to be known as “action painting.”

        My life-long use of automatism—creating abstract works which free the hand from conscious control—made me pounce on the opportunity to view he Art Institute of Chicago’s well-curated “Willem de Kooning Drawings”exhibit several times. I went searching for insights into his famously known “slipping glimpses” and to witness the eccentric “palimpsest” of graphic and material experimentation for which his work is well known. The retrospective intelligently punctuates more than 170 drawings with his most significant paintings: Pink Angels (1945), Excavation (1950), and Woman I (1950-1952). These inclusions give an even-handed sense of how his innovations in drawing spontaneously slipped into his paintings and vice versa. The drawings become a kind of transparent record that gives clues as to how the opaque layers in his oil paintings came to be constructed.

        The first room focuses on the artist’s rigorous academic training at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques in Holland. Long ago, art critic Robert Hughes recognized about de Kooning: “He brought with him something that very few of his colleagues in the New York School of the forties and fifties would turn out to have: a thorough, guild-based art training that centered on formal drawing of the figure.”1 Components of precise drawings from the 1930s and early 1940s such as the squares, circles, and triangles in his commercial illustration The Netherlands (1944) or the limbs and torso of the female figure in Reclining Nude (Juliette Brauner) (1938) would become more fragmentary and fluid under pressure from automatist spontaneity. This change can be seen in the abstracted female body in Study for Pink Angels (1945) and the square patterns in Judgment Day (1946). The latter work is held together by a Cubist-inspired undergirded structure which becomes an important device for keeping the chaos of automatist velocity in check. In both paintings and prints, charcoal lines dive into paint where thick and thin erased lines plow through equally thick and thin paint layers. These built-up surfaces create shuttling tensions across the surface, revealing the artist’s process.

        The exhibit emphasizes de Kooning’s experimental flare for testing new painting materials and techniques, a tendency inspired from his adolescent experiences working for the Dutch commercial decorating firm Gidding and Zorn. He would spray fixative on his pastels, liquifying them into powdery puddles that could be brushed like watercolor. Erased layers of pencil and pastel drawing become the rich smudgy surfaces for new layers. Both techniques are used in Two Women’s Torsos (1952). He added pumice to black ink, giving his lines an atmospheric quality. One technique was developed from his time working as a housepainter: scraping down multilayers of colored paint. In Pink Angels, a triangular scraped area shows fuzzy underlayers of green and ochre color, bringing a mysterious ethereal depth to the surface.

        One of de Kooning’s most recognizable innovations was a masterful use of enamel paint applied with a thin floppy sign painter’s brush. This combination formed a loose whiplash line demonstrated by in drawings like Florida Trailer (1950-51). Syrupy lines of black enamel are swiped with a paint spatula, creating energetic ribbons of force that peel off spontaneous linework. It is altogether fitting that these drawings are placed next to de Kooning’s largest painting, Excavation (from The Art Institute of Chicago’s collection). Whiplash enamel and charcoal lines full of angular drips and spatters battle against streams of thickly clotted white paint. This black and white struggle of line makes the gaze circulate in an endless abstract labyrinth, held in place by Cubist “scaffolding” that seems barely able to keep the energetic surface tension from bursting into chaos. The muscle memory of all material and technical possibilities from de Kooning’s training, mixed with the confident and flow of automatist gesture, come to the fore in this singular masterwork.

        Many drawings make use of the carbon and tracing paper he employed in the past as a commercial draughtsman. The art critic Thomas Hess remarked on how “de Kooning will do drawings on transparent tracing paper, scatter them on top of one another, study the composite drawing that appears on top, make a drawing from this, reverse it, tear in half, and put it on top of still another drawing.”2 Two Women on a Wharf (1949) makes use of another commercial technique: moving painted collage elements around until they are tacked on with masking tape. Many tracing paper drawings appear in the exhibit after 1960, demonstrating the degree to which he depended on this technique to endlessly review and revise his painting compositions.

        About halfway through the exhibit, beginning around 1960, much of the work shows a loss of the energy, structural tension, and fluid line that had once underpinned the artist’s most expressive work. Still, some of his paintings, such as Untitled XI (1975), hold up well because the density of the oil paint combined with the web of fluid gestures provide enough solidity to hold up the abstract field. But the sputtering shakiness of his clam diggers, wispy women—see Untitled (Three Figures) (1968)—look like so many bodies made of lumpy cotton rather than flesh. This change happened around the time that de Kooning left New York city, moving to the Springs in East Hampton, Long Island. One can only conjecture that the divorce from his wife, Elaine, along with the loss of his New York artistic praxis, increasing alcoholism, and isolation may have contributed to the “trembling” line that invaded de Kooning’s drawing. To be sure, there’s no denying that anxiety was endemic to his work and life before then. As he states: “My interest in desperation lies only in that sometimes I find myself having become desperate. Very seldom do I start out that way. I can see of course that, in the abstract, thinking and all activity is rather desperate.”3

       Perhaps having too much isolation brought up ruminations about his deep past and the struggles of his childhood. His mother Cornelia “…regularly beat her children…she would have screaming fits and hit them with wooden shoes…she regularly enjoyed with him [de Kooning] the dark pleasures of the long drawn out and knocked down battle.”4 Knowing this, it comes as no surprise that his work of the 1950s often depicted women as fearful monstrosities that were also the objects of scorn and ridicule. I see the drawings of crucified male figures, like Untitled (1966), seem to reflect his identification with helplessness and suffering he endured when he was too young to protect himself.

        Aside from a cursory mention of Jackson Pollock’s influence on de Kooning, I found it problematic that there was little attention paid to exactly how abstract automatism impacted his work. The recognition of “action painting” marked the most important inflection point in the development of the Abstract Expressionist movement. This omission is best explained in Charles Darwent’s fairly recent book, The Surrealists in New York: Atelier 17 and the Birth of Abstract Expressionism. Important events were “inexplicably overlooked when applied to events in art history…if the broad forgetting of Atelier 17 in New York is easily explicable, it is an omission that seems historically unfair.” 5 The book explains how, during WWII, Studio 17 in New York City was the place where well known modernist artists such as Joan Miro, Mark Chagall, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, and Andre Masson experimented with printmaking. It was the place where these expatriate surrealists transferred important ideas about the “automatic” use of the unconscious that affected the prints and plates that were created at Studio 17 by Jackson Pollock, William de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Adolph Gottlieb. Pollock’s use of the drip and “all over” approach to image, achieved by rotating the image on its side or upside down, had a significant impact on de Kooning’s practice—innovations that inspired him to say Pollock “broke the ice” and “busted our idea of a picture to all hell.”6 Charles Darwent significantly adds how:

        “Collectively, the cast that assembled in the [Studio 17’s] two New York spaces—the first in W. 12^th St., the second in E. 8^th St.—helped affect perhaps the greatest shift to take place in mid-century culture. In 1939, Paris had been the unchallenged world capital of modern art. By 1949, its place had been taken by New York. Much of this exchange happened at the two Atelier 17’s…”7

        Clearly tapping into the unconscious mind helped to release boundless fields of kinesthetic energy in de Kooning’s work–something this important retrospective offers in abundance. Hopefully, Darwent’s story of exactly how this Surrealist/Abstract Expressionist exchange occurred will inspire the creation of a new exhibit showing the synergistic interchange between both of these seminal mid-twentieth-century art historical movements.

Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, IL. She is a Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant Recipient who exhibits internationally. Her work is in the collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum, the National Hellenic Museum, the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, the Block Museum at Northwestern University, and the Illinois Holocaust Museum among many others. For more information and to read more of her published art writing visit dianethodos.com.

Footnotes:

1. https://www.theartstory.org/critic/hughes-robert/
2. Abstract Painting.Thomas Hess, New York, Viking, 1951, p. 132
3. https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/willem_de_kooning_158308
4. de Kooning: An American Master. Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan,Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. pp.11 – 12
5. Surrealists in New York: Atelier 17 And the Birth of Abstract Expressionism. Charles Darwent, Thames and Hudson. p. 13
6. AZ Quotes https://www.azquotes.com/author/8208-Willem_de_Kooning
7. Surrealists in New York: Atelier 17 And the Birth of Abstract Expressionism. Charles Darwent, Thames and Hudson. p. 13