Sunday Lunch Arts & Culture: Willem de Kooning

Figure and Light

L&M Gallery Los Angeles.

Last week I had the chance to visit L&M Gallery on Venice Blvd. in Venice California.  This space is fantastic and if you haven’t been to a show there you should try to make it.  It is set up as two separate buildings and they are beautiful with exposed brick and amazingly high ceilings.  The Willem de Kooning show that I saw was called figure and light and fit perfectly into these two buildings.  The first building housed a collection of his most famous works, the Women drawings, which comprised the figure part of the show.  The second building held the minimalist abstract paintings he was making right before his death, the light section.  It was an amazing opportunity to see his early and late work in the same place and I was in awe of the show as a whole.

Willem De Kooning was born in Rotterdam in 1904, studied fine arts in Brussels at the Academie Royale des Beau-arts.  He then moved to New York and worked alongside Arshille Gorky and other influential artists at the Federal Arts Project.  Many of these artists would come to be known as The New York School and worked in the style of abstract expressionism or action painting.  Though De Kooning was influential among his peers it wasn’t until the 1960’s that he created his seminal work Women.  I really loved the drawings they had at L&M that were part of this work.  They combined intense colors with aggressive marks and erasures.  I believe the intense mostly primary colors really allow the viewer to focus on the motion of the piece.  You can almost feel him carving out the form of the figures and the space around them.  Though aggressive the markings are acute and intentional, done with a finesse that makes each piece dance in front of your eyes.  Though these drawings were very controversial De Kooning continued with this style for much of his life working with figures, landscapes, and bronze sculpture.

Towards the end of his life Willem De Kooning became very ill and was unable to continue in the physical and aggressive style that he had used to define himself.  However, he never stopped painting, and there is something astounding and meditative about the work at L&M created at the end of his life.  A quote on the wall by Willem said something akin to “getting old doesn’t necessarily mean you get better, but I think I can do it better now.”  These large canvases consisted of several strokes of bright oil paint.  The thing I found astounding was that they reminded me so much the Women work.  Though the erasure, the aggressive marks, the labored rendering of form and space were gone what remained seemed the essence of those works.  A simple line that tells the whole story of what all that work had been for.  As if at the end of his life he knew how to say it with clarity, to wipe away all the fuss and just get to the heart.  If you get a chance to see this show I highly recommend it.