menuPaper: The Art of Forgetting
04 November, 2003
I
In the novel Scar tissue Michael Ignatieff describes the dementia of his mother. At an old age, she started painting. One of her favourite painters was Willem de Kooning.
De Kooning belongs to a group of 'abstract expressionists'. To them, the act of painting was far more important than for instance composition. They preferred the doing!
His art is not aimed at creating ideal beauty nor at meeting aesthetic criteria. His guideline is the precision with which he translates his experience into painting. ‘Forms ought to have the emotion of a concrete experience’, he always said.
The theme of all his painting is reality. Even its trivial aspects are part and parcel of our lives and De Kooning doesn’t eschew them. His art evolves on all levels of consciousness, i.e. visual impressions, lightning images from memory, moods, insights. Or at least a glimps of all that. De Kooning in his own words: ‘As a matter of fact, I'm really slipping most of the time, into that glimpse. I'm like a slipping glimpser’
De Kooning was not the archetype of an action painter. Though the painting act was brief and vehement, he devoted a considerable length of time to critical observation and contemplation, haunted by doubts, to ultimately arrive at a decision. Ever since he started painting De Kooning was nearly incapable of finishing a picture. He was always doubting, adding, and changing, resulting in what I would like to call De Kooning's powerful handwriting. All of his subjects are shed in light: the exuberant, overwhelming light of Springs, Long Island, where he worked for many years.
The morning light is mingled with the fog and the sand at the beach. This is De Kooning’s world. He doesn’t paint the Atlantic Ocean but its reflection in the vibrating air, with all those nuances, shades and strokes. The grey sea, the yellow beach, the light and its restless fleeting reflections in the water are predominant in his work. The finest collection of his work is presented at the Stedelijk Museum. There you can see Montauk IV but also Rosy-fingered dawn at Louse Point,
The human figure – notably the woman – is a recurrent theme. These woman are, however, unlike the idols from the bubblegum-generation. They are always shed in light and colour, but at times, the figure is completely absorbed by the scenery, transformed into landscape.
Seeing this woman one doesn’t fall in love with her at first sight. De Kooning’s women are carnal, vulgar and aggressive. They are intrusive and repulsive. Women like razorblades. A critic called them ‘images of Doris Day with a shark’s teeth’. Here is a detail of the lovely face of this woman.
The vitality, the energy and the broad scope are typical for De Kooning. He doesn’t care about ‘content’. Content is only a glimpse of something, it’s a something very tiny, very tiny, content. He always said.
He cared more on his handwriting: the fierce brush strokes, the thick paint that took many, many hours to clot, just to enable him to keep changing the image once more. As you can see in this detail.
De Kooning painted with consistent regularity like someone keeping a diary.
Let us see what he wrote – i.e. painted – in the 80’s.
II
In 1983, fifteen years after the first one, the Stedelijk Museum held a retrospective of his work, called ‘The North Atlantic Light 1960-1983'. Most of his famous works were presented to the public, but critics were highly interested in his recent paintings. They saw another De Kooning.
The paint was thinner, more fluid. The colours were more balanced. The composition less complex. Whereas De Kooning always rendered many coated paintings, these paintings had all but a few coatings, as if De Kooning made less revisions than he used to.
Critics reacted different. Most of them were positive. They praised De Kooning for having the guts to explore new directions. His breach of style being a new step in a long career. The praised the lyrical aspects of the work, which they called ‘sheer poetry’, light as a feather, rhythmically. One critic wrote that his recent paintings brought to him the same delight as dancing a Vienna Waltz after drinking just a little bit too much champagne.
Others made a negative judgement. ‘The painter lost his energy’. ‘Childish nonsense’.
‘It looks as if he poured a can of thinner on the canvasses.’
Also in 1983 De Kooning received a royal award for his merits in modern art. On their way home De Kooning asked his wife Elaine: ‘who was that woman?’
‘But, Bill, that was the queen’. ‘Oooh’, De Kooning replied, ‘I see, somehow she looked familiar’. The forgetfulness of De Kooning increased, as did his confusion. Rumour had it that De Kooning was suffering from dementia. Elaine more and more protected her husband by isolating him from the outside world.
In the years there-after the De Kooning-affair worldwide was front-page news. His daughter Lisa succeeded in having him declared "non compos mentis" in court.
Around 1985 his condition worsened. Elaine cared for him and she appointed some assistants to help De Kooning. They prepared the canvasses. And after De Kooning painted some strokes, they assisted colouring the paintings. Being a house-painter in his younger days, he called these days ‘my days off’. De Kooning used red, white and blue in those years. But then the critics objected to his use of colour and Elaine gave the assistants the order to give De Kooning some yellow, orange en green as well.
Alzheimer’s disease
Dementia involves a fragmentation, a breaking-up, of all the processes of thought and feeling which enable a healthy person to remain in touch with his world. One of the first symptoms is forgetting recent information or recent events. Often the character, the nature of the patient changes: he or she becomes vulnerable, irritable, less spontaneous, anxious and gloomy.
What are the consequences for a painter? First a decline of his abstract thinking, judgement and spatial orientation (movement). The visual cortext is affected at an early stage, and therefore visual perception changes, such as the perception of colours. Patients experience difficulties in ‘automatic behaviour’, such as bringing a cup of coffee to their mouth. How about using a paintbrush? The working-memory is almost always affected. Reluctantly, I would like to take a further step. Probably the capacity to remember an artful idea or image is so seriously damaged that the patient cannot compare it to the result of his work-in-progress on the canvas. In other words: possibly the final painting has no connection whatsoever with the initial idea of the artist or the painting he originally had in mind.
That is my opinion. Oliver Sacks rejects this, saying that style, in neurological terms, is preserved within the deepest of our being, and so style will be preserved until the end.
So, what in 1983 seemed to be a breach of style, proved to be in retrospect the outcome of the first signs of the artist's dementia. The most recent expositions in Rotterdam and London 1996 were dreadful events.
III
Ignatieff on De Kooning
All I said is based on catalogues, books, interviews, reviews, medical textbooks and – not in the least – my own opinion. Let us now turn to another source, the novel which I mentioned in the first line of this paper: Scar Tissue by Michael Ignatieff. As I said it is a novel – not a memoir – on the dementia of his mother, who was fond of the paintings of Willem de Kooning. It is a remarkable novel, because of the fact that it incorporates an essay, essay on ‘the case Willem de Kooning’. I quote.
...The work De Kooning produced from within dementia bas divided the critics. Some believe the later work displays a surer line and firmer grasp of colour than those which he completed in a preceding period when he was often drunk. The new paintings are composed of swirls of colour, so unworldly, so unlike anything seen in nature, so unlike the works of conscious intention that other critics have argued they are valueless as works of art, merely of interest to neurologists and clinicians. Yet it is surely a mistake to restrict the definition of art to those works which are the product of conscious intention. The whole direction of twentieth century art has been away from conscious intention towards unleashing the spontaneous, infantile and subconscious sources of creative energy...
De Kooning's work raises the possibility that art might still exist where there is no artist; that a painting might still be painted where there is no self to do the painting. The illness might merely be paring away the reflexive, self-aware and cognitive capacities of the brain, leaving behind deep structures, either genetically inherited or formed in earliest infancy, which could continue to respond to the elemental geometry of colour and line. If this were true, De Kooning's brush might no longer be connected to an intentional self, but rather to the deep structures of his own creative inspiration. The argument about De Kooning thus is not just about the relation between inspiration and illness. It is also a rerunning of a much more ancient argument about the nature of art itself. On one side, the romantic account of creativity, as the work of raw, unmediated feeling. On the other the classical account, which locates artistic creativity in the reflexive and self-aware portions of the brain ...
At the time of writing the novel, Ignatieff could write about De Kooning, of course, but not a word about his mother. He needed the case of De Kooning to explore his own life and his mothers life. And he asks again:
Where does art come from? From the intentional self or from the primal self? Willem de Kooning kept painting after he ceased to be able to speak or reason or recognize those closest to him. The romantic vies of art connects the painter’s brush to the primal self; the classical view to the intentional self. What happens when one is sheared away from the other?
Intriguing questions indeed: Can we still speak of art, when the artist is not in possession of his normal mental capabilities? Is the stammering of a lunatic poetry? Did Alzheimer’s disease undermine De Kooning’s creativity or did it change its energy? Dementia surely leaves traces. De Kooning's powerful, multicoloured light has been replaced by a clear, open sky. It seems as if dementia is presenting De Kooning's intensity in milder form.
IV
The relation between art and illness is a complex. Just see how I composed this paper in order to come to a judgement on De Kooning’s later work:
| early work by De Kooning | ← | interpretative (idiom of modern art) |
| ↓ | ||
| Alzheimer | ← | descriptive (medical idiom) |
| ↓ | ||
| De Kooning’s later work | ← | speculative |
| ↑ | ||
| essay | ← | narrative |
| ↑ | ||
| novel | ← | fiction |
Concentrating on his later work, I took a look at his classic pictures. Furthermore I knew he had Alzheimer, so I read some textbooks and spoke to neurologists. Then I read Ignatieff’s novel (which is fiction) that incorporates an essay (which is non-fiction, though a narrative). Each source has it’s own voice and it’s own specific mode of reasoning. One who would omit a source of information, must necessarily come to another judgement. How would someone judge De Kooning’s later work, knowing nothing at all about his earlier work, his being affected by Alzheimer’s disease nor having read anything at all about Willem de Kooning? What is a fair judgement? What is quality?
This is my favourite picture of the old Willem de Kooning, his right shoulder hanging, looking at one of his last paintings. But take a look at the hair: it looks as if the hair is painted with the strong sweeping brush of the young Willem De Kooning.
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