De Kooning's Derring-Do

For most critics, Willem de Kooning at 63 is the foremost living U.S. painter to emerge in the postwar period. But the reclusive white-locked dean of a bstract expressionism has not had a Manhattan exhibit of new work in five years, largely because the attendant bustle drives him to the brink of distraction. Thus, when 45 De Kooning oils and 50 drawings, mostly completed in the past four years, went on view at Manhattan's Knoedler & Co. this week, it was the most eagerly anticipated art gallery exhibit of the season.

For their wait, De Kooning's admirers were generously rewarded. De Kooning's latest work (see color opposite) is a highly sophisticated summation of all the major developments of his previous styles. Still present are the whiplash strokes and splatter that were his trademark in the mid-1940s when the cantankerous immigrant Dutchman, onetime housepainter and WPA artist, was helping to establish abstract expressionism. In the early 1950s, he had devoted himself to a bloodthirsty series of darkly lurid women totems (among them, Marilyn Monroe). No sooner had his women gained acceptance than he switched again, to abstract landscapes, shown as if glimpsed from some speeding auto. In the 1960s he returned to women, this time pink and gaudy (TIME, Feb. 26, 1965).

Plum & Apricot. His latest show is also largely women--but, reflecting the fact that De Kooning has become a year-round resident of The Springs, near East Hampton on the tip of Long Island, they are now red-lipped exurban earth goddesses, bitchily toothy yet pudgily placid. These women blend into their surroundings of golden beaches, russet leaves and close-cropped lawns. And they are accompanied by other members of the family circle. De Kooning's Cybele has found a froglike mate, titled Man, a leering Cyclopean nude, contorted in some private courting ritual. Their bloated offspring, as seen in Woman and Child, is allied to the parents by De Kooning's inimitable soiled-pink flesh tones.

And yet the paintings, for all their bizarre imagery, are alive with color. De Kooning's intricate palette combines lemon, lime, fig, plum, raspberry, apricot and apple-blossom pink. Flooding the canvas is the clear country light that streams through his $200,000 studio, a structure that has gone through almost as many alterations as one of his paintings.

Ferocious Union. De Kooning no longer needs to worry about money or renown. His latest oils, priced from $12,000 to $55,000, will almost certainly be snapped up. Critics and scholars besiege him for interviews. Artists trek to his doorstep. Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum will mount a full-scale retrospective of his work next September, which will tour London, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

De Kooning never need paint another picture. But in fact, he normally paints seven hours a day, seven days a week, sketching on into the evenings in front of his TV after he has bicycled from his studio to his nearby home. "I am ambitious," he explains, "ambitious to be a fantastic artist." And the works on display at Knoedler's are indeed fantastic, in both senses of the word. They marry order and confusion, gaiety and lechery in a ferocious union. Arms, legs, breasts, hats, lips, teeth and an occasional baleful eye may peer from De Kooning's work. But more dazzling than any of these details is the derring-do of a creator, an artist who boldly dares over and over again to capture the essence of chaos.

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