DE KOONING'S MASTERWORK

THERE is a train track in the history of art that goes way back to Mesopotamia," Willem de Kooning once noted, with an artist's lordly disregard for details of engineering. "Duchamp is on it. Cezanne is on it." An imposing retrospective of his work, opening at the Museum of Modern Art this week, demonstrates that De Kooning, still hale and heartily turning out landscapes at 64, has already established his place along that main line.

Conspicuous in the show are 13 examples of his Women of 1950-55. These "bitch goddesses" outraged yet captivated the public taste at the time, perhaps because they were essentially familiar, looking nostalgically backward to Picasso's baleful demoiselles and George Grosz's Weimar whores. But looking backward in turn, most critics now find far more significant the abstract compositions that De Kooning executed between 1945 and 1950, before he immortalized his Women.

In the late 1940s, the Abstract Expressionists were admired by only a few hardy critics, loathed by rival painters, and ignored by virtually every museum and collector in the country. With his fellows, De Kooning hung out in grimy Greenwich Village cafeterias, endlessly debating the new esthetic and just as endlessly revising the canvases in his studio. De Kooning sought to capture on canvas the continuing essence of the creative act of painting itself. To do this, he jettisoned polished finish in favor of apparently raw brush strokes, which in reality were painstakingly executed and frequently reworked. On another level, he strove to transmute biomorphic forms into a single unending composition.

He succeeded most magnificently in Excavation, a strangely tawdry yet luminous 6-ft. by 8-ft. canvas completed at the culmination of the cycle in 1950. Why it is called Excavation is a mystery that remains with De Kooning. In fact, it resembles little except perhaps a crackling bonfire, where visions of possible nymphs and improbable satyrs gyre in the obscuring smoke. But it delves profoundly into method, its seething forms eluding both definition and restriction. Exhibited at the Venice Biennale later in 1950, along with works by Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky, it helped to establish Abstract Expressionism as the major art of its time. And it may have marked the occasion when Manhattan displaced Paris as the art capital of the world.

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