Big Splash

Since the death three years ago of Jackson Pollock, young abstractionists in search of a style have acclaimed as their leader New York City's Dutch-born Willem de Kooning, 55. A slim man with steel-grey hair, De Kooning does not welcome the title, shuts himself up in his Greenwich Village studio for weeks at a time, refusing to see visitors or acknowledge telegrams. When Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art this winter offered him a one-man exhibition, he turned it down. He was not ready, he said. In the past three years he has allowed only three large paintings to be sold. Word passed around that De Kooning had the jitters and would not show. But last week De Kooning was ready, and his public fell over themselves in their eagerness to prove their loyalty.

As early as 8:15 in the morning on opening day, collectors were queueing up outside 57th Street's Sidney Janis Gallery, jostling for first peeks and early buys. By noon. 19 of the show's 22 oils were sold at prices ranging from $2,200 for the smallest oil sketch to $14,000 apiece for five big canvases. At week's end a new De Kooning was not to be had for love or money. Shyly backed against a wall as the crowd milled through the gallery, De Kooning was startled and pleased: "There's no way of astonishing anyone any more. I'm selling my own image now. It's being understood. That's the way it's supposed to be."

De Kooning's "own image" will still leave a lot of viewers floundering in the broad, thick brush strokes and paint splatters. There is no trace of his earlier furiously hacked and lacerated images of women. In his present works De Kooning, without relenting in either slash or splash, has clearly moved toward landscape. The raw tones that De Kooning himself called "circus colors" are now fresher and brighter; images swim closer and more sturdily to the surface.

Merritt Parkway pictures the intersections in a way to give a highway com missioner a nervous breakdown, but the sense of speed, flashing chrome and areas of green peripherally seen, are all there. Palisade, with its sudden dropoff into a blue void, recalls De Kooning's own sense of vertigo when he looked down from cliffside Palisades Park to the Hudson below.

De Kooning cheerfully acknowledges this debt to nature: "I see things I like. I don't fight them. Maybe it's only a puddle. Four or five months later they come back to me." In much the manner of the old Zen painters, De Kooning believes the image must come all at once or not at all. When his three-year-old daughter Lisbeth put her hands on the wet paint, he left the palm print rather than doctor the surface and destroy the spontaneous feeling. "I'm not trying to be a virtuoso," he explains, "but I have to do it fast. It's not like poker, where you can build to a straight flush or something. It's like throwing dice. I can't save anything."

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