De Kooning_What Abstract Art Means to Me

8/13/2019 De Kooning_What Abstract Art Means to Me

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more important than the thing he is after. Thedemands for controlling forces-those that will fitthe emotional gamut exactly, moreover--are alltoo easily submerged.

Whistler's observation has been often quoted,-that an artist who paints Nature withoult a highdegree of selection is like a "pianist who sits on thekeyboard." Had Whistler been familiar with ab-stract art, he might have cautioned further againstsomeone who "sits on his palette." If a paintershould sit on the palette he'd probably producesomething strong and brutal there might even bea suggestion of agony. But can an artist thusfound a base of operations on which to build achanging world and when the shock is over, howwill it strike the eye in repose? Anyway, it shouldnever be uniqueness we are after, but the basis ofstyle.

This brings me to a second aspect. No one everhated modern art more violently than our latecritic, Mr. Royal Cortissoz. Yet I will honor himfor a penetrating notation, which I frequently re-call. He once summed up a modern exhibition withthe outburst "This may be all very interesting, butOh, the looks of it " He puts forward so memo-rably a truth whlich can never be over-stressed--that painting is basically an optical experience.(And by "looks of it" we must hang on to ouirin-stincts for quality, and not false conceptions ofappearance.) After this instantaneous effect, finepictures of course require long and repeated study-but to a surprising degree the initial tell-taleglance will carry through. And for abstract art thistest is merciless. There is no hiding from it throughsubject-interest; conifusion can cloud it for a mo-ment, but we are interested in something that willlast.Much more could be said about the two ingre-dients of abstract art-the emotional impulse andthe structural fabric that is essential to make itcredible. In primitive art the ability to fuse thetwo is quite natural and appropriate. No wonderthe Cubists started from Negro sculpture-andthey themselves produced a unity that was weldedas tightly as a fist. How do we find this ourselves?There is not much to follow beyond one's qualita-tive sense. And now I am approachingthe territorywhere words can hardly follow. Taste and qualityare as difficult to trace consciously as to delineatethe exact points of superiority between a rare vin-

tage-wine and a bottle of Coca-Cola. Yet it is asense of quality which governs entirely the twopoints I have been stressing. One false note in anabstract picture can turn vintage-wine into a nastymedicine, and we must be ever alert for the taste.Moreover there are no rules for drawing the boun-daries. Still, I will close with a generalization--that art produces two opposing forces, like the in-take and outlet of the breath; it takes one indi-vidual impulse to activate a painting with life-the second fastens it with control, and makes pos-sible a firmeractivity toward the niextcreation.

WILLEM DE KOONINGThe first inan who began to speak, whoever hewas, must have intended it. For surely it is talkingthat has put "Art" into painting. Nothing is posi-tive about art except that it is a word. Right fromthere to here all art became literary. We are notyet living in a world where everything is self-evident. It is very interesting to notice that a lot ofpeople who want to take the talking out of paint-ing, for instance, do nothing else but talk about it.That is no contradiction, however. The art in it isthe forever nmutepart you can talk about forever.For me, only one point comes into my field ofvision. This narrow, biased point gets very clearsonmetimes. didn't invent it. It was already here.Everything that passes me I can see only a little of,but I am always looking. And I see an awful lotsometimes.

The word "abstract" comes from the light-tower of the philosophers, and it seems to be one oftheir spotlights that they have particularly fo-cussed on "Art." So the artist is always lighted upby it. As soon as it-I mean the "abstract"-comes into painting, it ceases to be what it is as itis written. It changes into a feeling which could beexplained by some other words, probably. But oneday, some painter used "Abstraction" as a title forone of his paintings. It was a still life. And it was avery tricky title. And it wasn't really a very good

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one. From then on the idea of abstraction becamesomething extra. Immediately it gave some peoplethe idea that they could free art from itself. Untilthen, Art meant everything that was in it-notwhat you could take out of it. There was only onething you could take out of it sometime when youwere in the right mood-that abstract and inde-finable sensation, the esthetic part-and still leaveit where it was. For the painter to come to the"abstract" or the "nothing," he needed manythings. Those things were always things in life-ahorse, a flower, a milkmaid, the light in a roomthrough a window made of diamond shapes may-be, tables, chairs, and so forth. The painter, it istrue, was not always completely free. The thingswere not always of his own choice, but because ofthat he often got some new ideas. Some paintersliked to paint things already chosen by others, and

after being abstract about them, were calledClassicists. Others wanted to select the thingsthemselves and, after being abstract about them,were called Romanticists. Of course, they gotmixed up with one another a lot too. Anyhow, atthat time, they were not abstract about somethingwhich was already abstract. They freed the shapes,the light, the color, the space, by putting them intoconcrete things in a given situation. They didthink about the possibility that the things-thehorse, the chair, the man-were abstractions, butthey let that go, because if they kept thinkingabout it, they would have been led to give uppainting altogether, and would probably have end-ed up in the philosopher's tower. When they gotthose strange, deep ideas, they got rid of them bypainting a particular smile on one of the faces inthe picture they were working on.

DE KOONING: The Mail Box. (1948). Oil on paper, 23?s x 30". Coil Nelson A. Rockefeller.

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The esthetics of painting were always in a stateof development parallel to the development ofpainting itself. They influenced each other andvice versa. But all of a sudden, in that famous turnof the century, a few people thought they couldtake the bull by the horns and invent an estheticbeforehand. After immediately disagreeing witheach other, they began to form all kinidsof groups,each with the idea of freeingart, and each demand-ing that you should obey them. Most of thesetheories have finally dwindled away into politicsor strange forms of spiritualism. The question, asthey saw it, was not so much what you couldpaintbut rather what you could not paint. You couldnot paint a house or a tree or a mnountain. t wasthen that subject matter came into existence assomething you ought not to have.

In the old days, when artists were very muchwanted, if they got to thinking about their useful-ness in the world, it could only lead them to believethat painting was too worldly an occupation andsome of them went to church instead or stood infront of it and begged. So what was considered tooworldly from a spiritual point of view then, becamelater-for those who were inventing the new es-thetics-a spiritual smoke-screen and not worldlyenough. These latter-day artists were bothered bytheir apparent uselessness. Nobody really seemedto pay any attention to them. And they did nottrust that freedom of indifference.They knew thatthey were relatively freer than ever before becauseof that indifference,but in spite of all their talkingabout freeing art, they really didn't mean it thatway. Freedom to them meant to be useful insociety. And that is really a wonderful idea. Toachieve that, they didn't need things like tablesand chairs or a horse. They needed ideas instead,social ideas, to make their objects with, their con-structions the "pure plastic phenomena"-whichwere used to illustrate their convictions. Theirpoint was that until they came along with theirtheories, Man's own form in space-his body-was a private prison; and that it was because ofthis imprisoning misery-because he was hungryand overworked and went to a horrid place calledhome late at night in the rain, and his bones achedand his head was heavy-because of this very con-sciousness of his own body, this sense of pathos,they suggest, he was overcome by the drama of acrucifixion in a painting or the lyricism of a group

of people sitting quietly around a table drinkingwine. In other words, these estheticians proposedthat people had up to now understood painting interms of their own private misery. Their own senti-ment of form instead was one of comfort. Thebeauty of comfort. The great curve of a bridge wasbeautiful because people could go across the riverin comfort. To compose with curves like that, andangles, and make works of art with them couldonly make people happy, they maintained, for theonly association was one of comfort. That millionsof people have died in war since then, because ofthat idea of comfort, is something else.This pure form of comfort became the comfortof "'pure orm." The "nothing" part in a paintinguntil then the part that was niotpainted but thatwas there because of the things in the picturewhich were painted-had a lot of descriptive labelsattached to it like "'beauty," "lyric," "'form,""'profound, "space, ttexpression, "classic,"feeling," ""epic," romantic," "epure," "balance,"etc. Anyhow that "nothing" which was alwaysrecognized as a particular something-and assomething particular-they generalized, with theirbook-keepingminds, into circles and squares.Theyhad the innocent idea that the "something" ex-isted "in spite of" and not "because of" and thatthis something was the only thing that truly mat-tered. They had hold of it, they thought, once andfor all. But this idea made them go backward inspite of the fact that they wanted to go forward.That "something" which was not measurable,they lost by trying to make it measurable; andthus all the old words which, according to theirideas, ought to be done away with got into artagain: pure, supreme, balance, sensitivity, etc.Kandinsky understood ""Form" s a form, likean object in the real world; and an object, he said,was a narrative-and so, of course, he disapprovedof it. He wanted his "music without words." Hewanted to be "'simpleas a child." He intended,with his "'inner-self," to rid himself of "philo-sophical barricades"(he sat down and wrote some-thing about all this). But in turn his own writinghas become a philosophical barricade,even if it is abarricade full of holes. It offers a kind of Middle-European idea of Buddhism or, anyhow, some-thing too theosophic for me.The sentiment of the Futurists was simpler. Nospace. Everything ought to keep on going That's

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probably the reasoii they went themselves. Eithera man was a machine or else a sacrifice to makemachines with.

The moral attitude of Neo-Plasticism is verymuch like that of Constructivism, except that theConstructivists wanted to bring things out in theopen and the Neo-Plasticists didn't want anythingleft over.I lhave learned a lot from all of them and theyhave confused me plenty too. One thing is certain,they didn't give me my natural aptitude for draw-ing. I am completely weary of their ideas now.The only way I still think of these ideas is interms of the individual artists who came fromthem or invented them. I still think that Boccioniwas a great artist and a passionate man. I likeLissitzky, Rodchenko, Tatlin and Gabo; and Iadmire some of Kandinsky's painting very much.But Mondrian, that great merciless artist, is theonly one who had nothing left over.The point they all had in common was to beboth inside and outside at the same time. A newkind of likeness The likeness of the group instinct.All that it has produced is more glass and an hys-teria for new materials which you can lookthrouigh.A sympton of love-sickness, I guess. Forme, to be inside and outside is to be in an unlieatedstudio with broken winldows n the winter, or -tak-ing a nap on somebody's porch in the summer.

Spiritually I am wherevermy spirit allows me tobe, and that is not necessarily in the future. I haveno nostalgia, however. If I ain confronted witlhoneof those small Mesopotamian figures, I have nonostalgia for it but, instead, I may get into a stateof anxiety. Art never seems to make me peacefulor pure. I alwavs seem to be wrapped in the melo-drama of vulgarity. I do not think of inside oroutside-or of art in general---as a situation ofcomfort. I know there is a terrific idea there some-where, but whenever I want to get into it, I get afeeling of apathy and want to lie down and go tosleep. Some painters, including myself, do notcare what chair they are sitting on. It does noteven have to be a comfortable one. They are toonervous to find out where they ought to sit. Theydo not want to "sit in style." Rather, they havefound that painting--any kind of painting, anystyle of painting-to be painting at all, in fact-isa way of living today, a style of living, so to speak.That is where the form of it lies. It is exactly in its

uselessness that it is free. Those artists do not wantto conform. They only want to be inspired.The group instinct could be a good idea, butthere is always some little dictator who wants tomake his instinct the grouip nstinct. There is nostyle of painting now. There are as many natural-ists among the abstract painters as there are ab-stract painters in the so-called subject-matterschool.The argument often used that science is reallyabstract, and that painting could be like musicand, for this reason, that you cannot paint a manleaning against a lamp-post, is utterly ridiculous.That space of science-the space of the physicists-I am truly boredwith by now. Their lenses are sothick that seen through them, the space gets moreand more melancholy. There seems to be no end tothe misery of the scientists' space. All that it con-tains is billions and billions of hunks of matter,hot or cold, floating arouind n darkness accordingto a great design of aimlessness. The stars I thinkabout, if I could fly, I could reach in a few old-fashioned days. But physicists' stars I use as but-tons, buttoning up curtains of emptiness. If Istretch my arms next to the rest of myself andwonder where my fingersare-that is all the spaceI need as a painter.

Today, some people think that the light of theatom bomb will change the concept of paintingonce and for all. The eyes that actually saw thelight melted out of sheer ecstasy. For one instant,everybody was the same color. It made angels outof everybody. A truly Christian light, painful butforgiving.

Personally, I do not need a movement. Whatwas given to me, I take for granted. Of all move-ments, I like Cubism most. It had that wonderfulunsure atmosphere of reflection-a poetic framewhere something could be possible, where an artistcould practise his intuition. It didn't want to getrid of what went before. Instead it added some-thing to it. The parts that I can appreciate inother movements came out of Cubism. Cubismbecamea movement, it didn't set out to be one. Ithas force in it, but it was no "force-movement."And then there is that one-man movement, MarcelDuchamp-for me a truly modern movementbecause it implies that each artist can do what hethinks he ought to-a movement for each personand open for everybody.

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De Kooning_What Abstract Art Means to Me