Member Lecture: Willem de Kooning Drawing

Hello. Welcome. As we begin, a brief reminder to please silence your cell phones.

I'm Court Tan, the museum's Director of Annual Giving, and it is my pleasure to welcome a room full, or an auditorium full of members this afternoon, or this morning, we're in the morning. Yesterday, we had the distinct pleasure of welcoming thousands of members to the first day of previews. We had two lectures filling the auditorium.

And this morning is another reminder that it is you, our members, who make this place a thriving community and a beacon of the arts across all of Chicago. Thank you so much for being here today. Before we begin, a couple of very good reasons for you to continue visiting throughout the summer.

First, we've introduced Third Thursdays sponsored by UNIQLO, bringing new programming and events across the museum every third Thursday evening. We've also recently reopened our pop-up garden bar in Pritzker garden of the Modern Wing. So please join us, weather dependent, when you can.

I also encourage you to stop by our bar on the second floor of the modern wing to enjoy Gladys Nilsson's "Caked" mural that was just put up this spring in honor of her 85th birthday. "Willem De Kooning Drawing," as you will see, represents drawing as a process of discovery. And that for Willem de Kooning, it was a lifelong pursuit that influenced and made its way into all parts of his practice, from sketches and studies to finished paintings, prints, and even sculptures.

In addition to members like you, we are grateful to the organizations and donors that have supported this exhibition, in particular, the Willem De Kooning Foundation. It is now my pleasure to welcome and introduce our presenter, Kevin Salatino for an exclusive look into "Willem de Kooning Drawing." Since 2017, Kevin has served as chair and the, gonna get his title right, Anne Vogt Fuller and Marion Titus Searle Curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings where he has curated exhibitions such as "Ellsworth Kelly: Portrait Drawings" and "Mel Bochner Drawings: A Retrospective," amongst others. Previously, he was the director of the art collections at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, Director of Bowdoin College Museum of Art, curator and head of Prints and Drawings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and curator of graphic arts at the Getty Research Institute.

Kevin holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and earned his bachelor's degree at Columbia University. It is now my pleasure to welcome Kevin to the stage. Thank you, Kevin.

(audience applauds)

Thank you, Court. Welcome, everyone. I'm really impressed everyone came out at a beautiful Friday morning to a lecture.

Quick show of hands, how many of you have already had the opportunity to at least have a peak at the show? Quite a few. That's good. So things will, a number of things will be very recognizable. All right, great.

When I mentioned Willem de Kooning to a Chicago audience, to those of you who are familiar with de Kooning's work, of course, the first thing that probably comes to mind is "Excavation," one of the artist's seminal paintings acquired by the Art Institute in 1952 after having won the Frank G. Logan Purchase Prize in the Art Institute's 60th annual American Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture the previous year. Or you might think of the Art Institute's other, slightly earlier, painting, "Untitled," circa 1948-49, one of a group of lyrical black and white abstractions de Kooning made in the late 1940s. Or, if you know our Prints and Drawings collection, you may remember his pastel, "Two Women's Torsos," from 1952, another work acquired shortly after it was created and considered one of his greatest woman drawings of the 1950s.

Or, leaving Chicago for a moment, let's move forward, there we go, you might very possibly think of his iconic "Woman I" along with "Excavation," his best-known work long a keystone of the Museum of Modern Art's narrative of the great modernist movements of the 20th century, and a monument of Abstract Expressionism. Of course, the theme of the Woman has been central to our conception of de Kooning's art, and not only, or even necessarily primarily, in his paintings. For he was a prolific draftsman, and his drawings of women, three of which you see here, so ubiquitous, in both public and private collections, their morphology so deeply familiar to us, are, in many cases, better known even than his many paintings of the subject.

But who among us, upon seeing this remarkable drawing for the first time, would say, without hesitation, "ah, yes, a de Kooning, it couldn't be anything but"? Aside from de Kooning specialists, I'd venture to guess, no one. And so here's where our de Kooning journey begins, the origin of everything. Willem de Kooning did not spring, fully formed, from the head of Zeus.

In 1917, at the age of 13, he began his training in both fine and commercial art at the Rotterdam Academy of Visual Arts and Technical Sciences, in the Netherlands, studying there for four, possibly five, years. Since he had, at the same time, a full time job at the design firm of Gidding & Sons, to whom he had been apprenticed at the age of 12, he could only take the Academy's evening drawing class, studying five or six nights a week, four hours a night. It's important to note that the Academy's painting class was only held during the day, when de Kooning worked so he was unable to take it.

Thus, his formative training was primarily in the medium of drawing. The still life charcoal on the screen, his earliest extant drawing, is emblematic of the rigors of this training. And here, I should mention, that that training was virtually unchanged from the 19th-century academic tradition, which is to say as artists had largely been trained since the birth of the French Academy in the 17th century.

Made in de Kooning's third or fourth year class, over the course of a year, "Dish with Jugs" was produced under extraordinary conditions: the students were forced to train themselves to keep their eyes at fixed levels and at the same distance from the still-life, placed on a table on a stage, resuming the identical position day after day over the course of a year. Worked on two days a week for a full year, it's been estimated that it would have taken de Kooning an astonishing 600 hours to make. And here, in a photograph made at the very end of de Kooning's tenure at the Academy, you can see the Academy's plaster-cast-filled drawing class.

It's been suggested that the black-haired young man at dead center, leaning over his drafting board, may, in fact, be the 22-year old de Kooning himself. I'm not convinced, but it's a nice thought. Having left the Gidding firm in 1920, but while still enrolled at the Academy, de Kooning took a job with a freelance designer and art director whose major client was a high-end department store in Rotterdam, working for him for three years, mostly producing signs.

He later said, "I was a good letterer, and I could paint signs. I never expected to be an artist just to make a living that way." That sign painting will come in handy later, and was at least partially responsible for the fluidity of his graceful lines, dependent as they were on his unconventional use of the sign painter's so-called liner brush, a pointed, narrow brush, with very long fibers, about which more later. In 1924, he worked briefly in Brussels, for another decorating firm, during which he produced a portfolio of cartoons and caricatures, admitting, years later, "I have a lot of cartoonist in me." His earliest group of drawings to survive, the still-life is technically his earliest extant drawing, they demonstrate a lifelong interest in comics, the comedic, and popular culture.

In fact, many of his mature visual tropes and strategies, in embryonic form, can already be detected in these lively drawings. At the same time, a charcoal drawing like "The Kiss," from 1925, tells us that he was experimenting with new imagery, although strongly influenced by the kind of lingering, late 19th-century symbolism he must have found everywhere in Brussels. He was less aware of the international modernist trends already in full flush.

Ironically, it's not until he moves to New York that he'll be exposed to the dominant forms of early 20th-century European modernism, as represented by Matisse, Picasso, Miro, et cetera, that he will eventually find himself first imitating, and later innovating and leading. In 1926, de Kooning spontaneously, at the urging of a friend, didn't even tell his parents, stowed away aboard a U.S.-bound freighter, arriving in New York that summer, living first in Hoboken, and then in Manhattan. He initially found well-paying work as a house painter.

Assuming he'd make better money as an illustrator or commercial artist, he'd come to America on the assumption that such artists were paid serious money, he soon learned otherwise and went back to painting houses. By the next year, he found work, again well-paying, with a New York decorating firm, and later designed window displays for a chain of New York shoe stores. His training at the Rotterdam Academy, and his various design firm apprenticeships had prepared him for exactly this kind of work, at which he excelled.

He did not, however, ignore the then very small and insular pre-war New York art world. As he later said, "I met a lot of artists, but then I met Gorky." Arshile Gorky. And this was probably in 1929.

He also later said, "I was lucky when I came to this country to meet the three smartest guys on the scene: Gorky, Stuart Davis, and John Graham. They knew I had my own eyes, but I wasn't always looking in the right direction." Gorky, the great, troubled Armenian-American painter, would become a role model for de Kooning and a foundational influence on the then fledgling artist. Now, I want you to notice, before I change the slide, in the background of the photo, Gorky's painting, "Organization," almost, but not quite, finished.

Here, again, on the right, is Gorky's painting "Organization," in its final form, now at the National Gallery of Art. The biomorphic abstraction that comes to dominate Gorky's otherwise Cubist armature, and that you can clearly see in "Organization," and that constituted his visual vocabulary in the 1930s, will strongly assert itself in de Kooning's evolving style, heavily influenced as it was by Gorky, as I think you can see in this comparison. Of course, the source for both artists was ultimately Picasso, whom they worshiped.

Under Gorky's influence, but also under the influence of the Ukrainian-born artist and impresario John Graham as well as Stuart Davis, De Kooning made the life-altering decision to quit his day jobs and dedicate himself to painting full time, this was about 1935. In his own words, "I changed my attitude toward being an artist. Instead of doing odd jobs and painting on the side, I painted, and did odd jobs on the side." This was not an inconsequential decision, especially during the Great Depression.

In making it, de Kooning went from a relatively comfortable life-style to what can only be described as poverty. He would not emerge from that poverty for many years. In the mid-1930s, de Kooning was hired by the Depression-era Federal Arts Project Mural Division, a department of the WPA.

Between 1935 and 1937, he worked on proposed murals for a Brooklyn housing project and for the French Line shipping company. Significantly, the French Line project was under the direction of the French artist Fernand Leger, who, as a result, became another early influence. Unfortunately, neither of these murals was ultimately realized, although we do have a number of impressive surviving related studies.

"Untitled" circa 1937, was in all likelihood a preparatory study for one of these unexecuted murals. It appears, at first glance, to be a collage of cut-and-assembled colored papers. But it's not.

De Kooning accomplished its clever trompe-l'oeil effects by adding a thick black line along the edges of some of the composition's rectangular forms and by making strikingly convincing illusionistic overlaps, tricks he would have learned primarily at the design firm he'd worked for in Rotterdam. These skills, combined with the influence of his contemporaries, Jean Arp, Joan Miro, and Gorky, along with, to varying degrees, Leger and Piet Mondrian, create a something in between, not exclusively biomorphism and not quite Cubism. After leaving the Federal Arts Project, he was commissioned to design a 90-foot mural for the 1939 World's Fair Hall of Pharmacy, which you see here in a contemporary photograph on the right.

On the left, in what is perhaps the most complete of the surviving drawings related to his World's Fair mural, you can see all the technical skills he'd honed at the Rotterdam Academy put to new use, figuration here dueling with abstraction, a strategy we'll see throughout his career. Two drawings from the same moment, "Study for Mural in the Hall of Pharmacy," and "Untitled" circa 1939-42, though essentially abstract, again demonstrate the same rigorous technique as the remarkable still-life, "Dish with Jugs," that we looked at a moment ago. "Untitled" circa 1939-42, on the right, finds its closest kin, however, in an earlier drawing, on the left, which, although it nods to abstraction, is more insistently figurative than its successor.

And I think you can see that a head, a neck, and upper torso are clearly present. And it may be instructively compared with de Kooning's more literal anatomical self-portraits, especially the drawing "Study for Seated Man," on the right. You can see here that, actually, only by comparing "Untitled," circa 1939-42, with its predecessors, that is, and I apologize for everything being called "Untitled," but these, after all, are working drawings and so they would not have had titles.

At any rate, only by comparing "Untitled" circa 1939-1942, with its predecessors, "Untitled" circa 1937-39, and "Study for Seated Man" can we trace the progression of de Kooning's increasingly abstracted motifs. Of course, those studies don't exist in a vacuum. They were made as the artist worked toward a solution for his 1939 painted self-portrait, "Seated Man," which is second from the left.

I should emphasize, however, that this lineup should not be taken as literal or sequential; de Kooning regularly shifted, in his work, between figuration and abstraction, and no precise sequence is ever really traceable. De Kooning's devotion to traditional figure drawing, which existed alongside his will to abstraction, that seesawing between figuration and abstraction that was a leit-motif of his practice, makes itself especially felt in a group of drawings from the late 1930s to the early '40s, inspired by the 19th-century French painter/draftsman, Jean-August-Dominique Ingres, of which "Elaine de Kooning" and "Seated Woman," are among the most representative. There was an Ingres Revival in America in these years, promoted by de Kooning's friend, John Graham, himself inspired by Gorky, for whom Ingres was a touchstone.

As de Kooning later recalled: "I went to the Metropolitan Museum with Gorky and Graham. They drew after the Old Masters, but not me. I used to make imaginary portraits from Ingres.

I never did copies; I don't think I'd be able to." About de Kooning's so called "imaginary portrait from Ingres" which this very much is of Elaine, on the screen, his friend, the critic and poet Edwin Denby, related that she, quote, "Told me that when he did it he said he wasn't going to do any more of those, you could lose your mind doing them. She had picked it up from the litter on the studio floor." Although the drawing took de Kooning three sittings of six hours each, which should remind us, in miniature, of the tortuous Rotterdam Academy still-life exercise again, it apparently hadn't satisfied him and he'd tossed it away. Juliet Browner, the subject of an Ingres-inspired nude of about 1938, on the left, its source, probably Ingres's grisaille "Odalisque," acquired by the Metropolitan Museum in 1938, and much admired by Gorky and de Kooning, although another Ingre "Odalisque," on the far right, is closer formally, especially the position of the hip, and I want you to remember that hip as Juliet Browner's hip.

Juliet Browner described how he worked: "He would take a long time to finish a drawing," she said. "He would think a lot. It took him more than a week to draw my eyes." We find a suggestive source for de Kooning's portrait of Elaine in Ingres's "Madame Louis Leblanc," at center, a painting acquired by the Met in 1919, as well as in Jacques-Louis David's "Henriette de Verninac" on the right, which he saw, in a copy, in an exhibition at New York's Knoedler Gallery in 1940. In fact, he seems to have given Madame Leblanc's large saucer eyes to Elaine, as well as her right hand, and Henriette de Verninac's left hand.

"Woman's Head," on the left, may be seen as a kind of culmination of de Kooning's Ingres-inspired drawings. The drawing on the right, "Seated Woman" from 1941, represents then a kind of watershed moment, a transitional work in many ways, a breakthrough of sorts. No longer do de Kooning's lines seek exclusively to define contour or describe volume.

Instead, they escape such confines, especially from the influence of Ingres, and take on a life of their own, sweeping, spontaneous, a cascade of graphic mark-making that nevertheless clings to the figure, while at the same time acknowledging the flatness of the paper's surface. He achieves in this very small drawing, a doodle really, an unprecedented freedom that will come more and more, to define his practice. De Kooning's co-called "Manikin" drawings of around the same time, and you can see de Kooning switching back and forth between men and women, just as he switches back and forth between figuration and abstraction, have been related to their historical moment as avatars of the disillusioned Depression-era men of 1930s' Social Realism.

More literally, they reference de Kooning's shop-window display work of the time, while the artist himself claimed they were inspired by "men standing in the subway like manikins." We see something of this alienation in his hybrid painting "Seated Man," on the left, for which he himself posed, as he often did, in the figure's lost and melancholic expression, but also in the painting's facture, its state of unfinish, its tentativeness, it's as much drawn as it is painted. In it, line is still a means of probing, of searching. He won't experience a breakthrough, however, abandons the subject of men to devote himself to what will become his great theme, women, in the early 1940s.

He later said, "I was painting those male figures but I found out that that didn't get me anywhere." A high point of his so-called first Woman series, the formative "Queen of Hearts" 1943-46, is like the paintings is like the painting "Seated Man," heavily dependent upon a process-revealing line drawn in thick charcoal, breaking his composition into the compartmentalized and interlocking shapes that we saw earlier in his drawing, "Untitled" circa 1939-42, which is on the right. You can see that in the background of the "Queen of Hearts." Indeed, charcoal applied directly to the canvas and into the paint itself will become a defining characteristic, underlining the insistently graphic nature of his entire practice. Rarely acknowledged, however, is that he will continue to render men, mostly metaphorical self-portraits, and almost exclusively as drawings for the rest of his career.

The repetition, reuse, and reconfiguration of a relatively limited, but endlessly varied, vocabulary of forms and shapes is one reason de Kooning retains his hold on the viewer's consciousness. We can trace, for example, one motif, the stylized, deconstructed, and continually reformatted shape of a hip, from its inception in the already fragmenting, but still recognizable, sketch of a naked, semi-recumbent woman on the left, through to the disembodied, yellow, bent-noodle form in "Study for Pink Angels" on the right, though we should step back for a moment to acknowledge the probable origin-image of that hip shape, in de Kooning's Ingres-inflected drawing of Juliet Browner on the left. It then pops up again in the study on the left "Untitled ('Still Life')," now off axis and colored green in the drawing's lower left.

Culminating in his hybrid painting/drawing, "Pink Angels," where that hinged-hip form, now transmogrified, floats through a sea of fleshy body-like forms that suggest arms, legs, hips, buttocks, and phalluses, all ready to escape through the door at lower right. But de Kooning is never really finished with a preferred motif, and here, again, several years later, that obstinate shape makes a come-back, now as a purple, vaguely kneeling, amoeba-shaped figure at lower left in his rich and enigmatic "Abstraction" of circa 1949-50. The sheer number of drawings de Kooning made as his paintings gestated is astonishing, many of them destroyed in the process of making, cut up, used to transfer a design or to trace one, embedded into the fabric of the work itself, or simply cast aside and saved for a future iteration.

This photograph, on the right of de Kooning's studio in the mid-'40s, gives you, I think, a good idea of this abundance, even profligacy, of paper. "Pink Angels" itself is visible on an easel on the right, and you see a pile of working drawings scattered at its feet. The techniques de Kooning used for transferring motifs are on full view in this pair of drawings, a relatively rare instance in which his doublings are not man-man or woman-woman, but man-woman, which should nevertheless remind you of his earlier Mannikin drawings.

In fact, these, too, are almost certainly based on shop window mannequins. Here, making use of his typical strategies of cutting, erasing, and overpainting, he's first traced each figure using carbon transfer, reversed them, and then proceeded to radically alter the woman in the drawing on the right from a standing to a kneeling figure. In two of his most powerful drawings of women, produced at the same time as he's also making his black and white abstract paintings, about which more in a moment, the hovering presence of Picasso is unmissable, especially in "Untitled (Three Women)" on the left, which nods, more than nods, appears almost as a response to Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," which de Kooning saw in MoMA's Picasso retrospective of 1939-40, and again at MoMA in 1947.

In de Kooning's drawing/painting, the central, seated woman ultimately derives from the squatting woman, with an African mask for a face, on the right of Picasso's "Demoiselles." But de Kooning spins his figure around in such a way that she both faces and turns her back on us; her snarling, double-mouthed feline face staring directly at us. She's a contortionist whose body parts have no fixed determinants, spinning like a pinwheel. At the same time, de Kooning achieves spatial shallowness by an audacity of mark-making, the charcoal drawn over and into the paint, that simultaneously structures and flattens the work, setting in motion a push-pull of energy that also activates its three occupants.

We've come a long way from the "imaginary portraits from Ingres" of the early 1940s. In 1948, at the age of 44, de Kooning had his first one-man show at New York's Charles Egan Gallery, where his black-and-white abstract paintings were shown to critical acclaim. He had been, of course, a central figure in avant-garde New York art circles for many years, indeed had been lionized by the cognoscenti, but this was his first taste of mainstream critical recognition.

One of the strongest of his black-and-white enamel paintings, the Art Institute's "Untitled" 1948/49, on the screen, exemplifies the lyrical linearity that grants these extraordinary works their inherently graphic sensibility as well as their intrinsic eroticism. De Kooning applied the white paint at least partially with a liner brush, a tool he especially favored, traditionally used by sign painters, and characterized by a longer than usual tuft that allowed for sweepingly eloquent lines, all rendered with the flick of an expert wrist. His masterly handling of the liner brush is on full display here.

Now, as outrightly abstract as "Untitled" is, no image by de Kooning is ever exclusively abstract, having so often been born from representational imagery so broken down into its constituent parts that it's no longer readily available to the conscious mind. And while almost identifiable forms emerge from all the black-and-white paintings, in the Art Institute's painting, de Kooning drew an unequivocally recognizable image of a penis at the work's lower edge, just left of center. Whatever meaning we give to the painting must take this unusually overt sign into account.

Once we do, the work's eroticism proclaims itself, and the painting as event, as act, takes on a more potent implication. The act of drawing becomes both germinative and procreative. Of course, the artist and de Kooning confidant, Thomas Hess, believed that "all the black-and-white abstractions, as well as the white-and-black abstractions that follow, and the color abstractions that climax with 'Excavation,' are covert celebrations of orgiastic sexuality." "The act of lovemaking is the main drama," as he put it.

That should give you a whole new way of looking at "Excavation." That assertion places "Excavation," a work as gloriously enigmatic as any of de Kooning's, despite the recognizable imagery strewn about it, under a certain interpretive pressure. Indeed, the art historian, T. J. Clark, insists that, like Thomas Hess, "viewers were always supposed to know, with one part of their minds, that sex was what was being excavated." Excavation's densely tessellated composition is the end stage of an evolutionary process, as he painted, that began as an interior with figures, evolved, at mid-stage, into loosely-fitted and floating biomorphic shapes, and ended, finally, as the compact and puzzle-tight mosaic you now see, its original corporeal forms melted into the chalky texture of its allover abstraction. Those forms resemble discrete body parts, heads, torsos, limbs, buttocks, cut-up and reassembled.

So bodies do indeed lie, hidden in plain sight, beneath Excavation's smoldering surface. The same baggy, corporeal forms that we see in the paintings leading up to Excavation are also vividly present in de Kooning's swoopy and lyrical black-and-white enamel drawings of 1950-51. The appearance of swift execution, of unrestrained spontaneity and velocity in these drawings is, however, something of an illusion, despite the fact that the liner brush played an important role.

You see several of these, along with some sword brushes, on the screen, all of them from de Kooning's studio and all of them in the show. Countering that tool's agility, de Kooning also used a palette knife to control the paint's spread, thus laboring over, altering, and rethinking in real time its final resolution. The very notion of spontaneity and speed, so essential to the Abstract Expressionist mythos, is belied by de Kooning's inherently preparatory and premeditated practice.

The artist/critic Fairfield Porter recognized this early on, referring, in 1959, to de Kooning's "apparent velocity." Of course, "apparent velocity" can take many forms, and the sheer felt velocity of de Kooning's many abstractions can be experienced, almost physically, in his figure drawings as well. In "Two Women," 1951-52, which appears, in fact, to contain three, or even four, women, on the left, an explosion of a drawing rendered in charcoal, graphite, and pastel, de Kooning used both the fixative needed to protect the drawing, to fix the drawing, and a brush to pull and spread his medium as a medium dynamically upward from the left hand figure in swooshing lines that describe movement like zip ribbons in a comic strip. A description by Thomas Hess of de Kooning at work in this period seems particularly apt here: "I remember watching de Kooning begin a drawing in 1951.

He made a few strokes, then almost instinctively turned the pencil around and began to go over the graphite marks with the eraser. Not to rub out the lines, but to move them, push them across the paper, turn them into planes. The method to destroy, erase was being used as a means to create." Between 1947 and 1955, de Kooning worked on a sequence of complex and highly finished "Woman" drawings, among the most representative and recognizable images of his career.

He made these during his so-called second "Woman" series 1947-49, especially while teaching at Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, in the summer of 1948, and throughout his third "Woman" series 1950-55, most notably and productively during the summer of 1952 in East Hampton, when he and Elaine were staying with the dealer Leo Castelli and his wife Illeana Sonnabend. Yes, I want you to notice that on the wall on the background. The pastels he produced that summer, preliminary to his now-famous 1953 Sidney Janis Gallery exhibition, "Paintings on the Theme of the Woman," have been called "the most lush, assured, exquisite, powerful, and challenging works on paper of his career." That Janis Gallery exhibition included among its selection of paintings, of which "Woman I" was the most celebrated and controversial, included among those paintings, sixteen works on paper, most of them pastels, in the exhibition, we've managed to bring together 11 of those.

And while not, strictly speaking... And while not, strictly speaking, studies for the painting, all of them, and many others, exist in the orbit of, lead up to, influence, or provide the impetus for de Kooning's climactic masterpiece, "Woman I." You should look at "Woman I," above all, in the trajectory of the seated woman trope in the history of Western art, of which I give you a sampling here, Michelangelo, Rubens, Picasso, and finally de Kooning, because de Kooning saw himself less in competition with the artists of his own day, excluding perhaps Picasso, and more in competition with the masters of the past. As he once meaningfully said: "Everything is already in art, like a big bowl of soup." "Two Women with Still-Life," on the left, is arguably the definitive statement of de Kooning's "Woman" pastels, fully resolved and as finished as any of his paintings.

It's often said that de Kooning did not make "finished" drawings, but this comes as close to a "presentation drawing" as possible. It pulses with centrifugal energy, as if spinning off a central axis. Its vivid, nature-defying palette, held in place by a scaffold of contour-defining black charcoal, defies its shaky logic.

The woman at right, for example, dissolves into a kaleidoscope of competing colors, few of which strive for objective truth. But de Kooning's intuitive color sense, wild as it is, is so assured, the total effect of his palette so coherent and exuberant, that we never question its veracity. What de Kooning so triumphantly accomplishes in this ambitious pastel is a sense of deep space existing in simultaneity with a declarative surface, line and color in a battle for dominance.

In the Art Institute's "Two Women's Torsos," on the right, the pastel closest in sensibility to "Two Women with Still-Life," de Kooning purges the staffage of the other drawing to concentrate on the women alone. Their pneumatic forms more fully dominate the space they fill. Even the palette, a fleshier, sandier combination of pink, umber, yellow, and red, suggests a day at the beach.

For all their big-shouldered bravado, de Kooning counter-intuitively subverts their individuality by rendering them faceless, erasing their identity. The bifurcating streak of charcoal at shoulder level is in fact a de Kooning trope, seen again and again in his images of women, a horizontal zip that creates a kind of spatial disequilibrium. Dissolution of form and radical abstraction are precisely what occur in de Kooning's next phase of pastel drawings, from 1955-58.

A comparison, for example, of "Study for Woman VI," 1952 on the left, with "Untitled (Pastel #1)," 1956-58 on the right demonstrates the degree to which the abstracted pastels that follow the Woman pastels emerge from, or evolve out of, those works, which, in the case of "Untitled (Pastel #1)," can be interpreted as an extreme anatomical close-up, as if viewed through a magnifying glass. As a transitional pastel, "Study for Woman VI," with its thick horizontal and vertical sweeps of blue, red, and yellow, outlined in black charcoal, foreshadows the blocky shapes in the same primary color palette of "Untitled," sorry, of "Untitled (Pastel #1)." De Kooning famously called himself a "slipping glimpser," which, as the art historian Richard Shiff explains, "describes how he provides glimpses of things, tiny images, fractions of content, things viewed in passing, very ordinary things, the content appears in a brief moment, observed only as a fragment. The irony is that the little things bear more meaning than the big ones." We can see this "tiny" content, these "very ordinary things seen and touched with wonder," in de Kooning's "Folded Shirt on Laundry Paper" drawings from 1958, a remarkable group of abstractions but not quite in sweeping, calligraphic brush and black ink.

There are about a dozen Folded Shirt Drawings in all, five of which are in the show. While the drawings, especially in their initial stages, quite literally suggest the structure of the freshly pressed shirts that inspired them, they quickly morph into other forms. A figure, inherently present in the torso-mimicking shirt template, quickly emerges, though now transgendered, from male to female.

What began as the bulge of a collar soon expands, duplicating itself to become a pair of disembodied breasts, like a Brancusi sculpture perched on an altar. I should emphasize, however, that, as always with de Kooning, it's virtually impossible to determine an exact sequence in these drawings. The Folded Shirt drawings are modest forebears, sorry, modest forebears of the supremely immodest, in their unleashed sublimity, black-and-white drawings produced in Rome in 1959.

Painted in black enamel mixed with, we think, pumice on large sheets of paper with a broad house painter's brush, then torn and reassembled, some double-sided, into jarringly elegant compositions, they're ultimately dependent, for their remarkable powers of persuasion, their "wow" effect on de Kooning's commercial background, his learned knowledge of, among other things, sign painting. In other words, simple forms, simply expressed, catch and hold the eye. In one of the best Rome drawings, the majestic double-sided Black and White Rome S, de Kooning placed, side-by-side on the sheet's recto, on left of the screen, having joined separate sheets of cut or torn paper, a pair of look-alike hieroglyphs made of strident sweeps of thick black enamel.

His jagged-legged, spider-like shapes appear to be jauntily striding rightward, connecting them with slightly later, more definitively embodied, ink figures, such as "Untitled (Man)" and "Untitled," of 1961, one simply an offprint or counterproof, and thus reversed, of the other. The figure is always lurking within even de Kooning's most abstracted works. As Richard Shiff reminds us: "nearly all of de Kooning's 'abstractions' either began with a reference to the human figure or incorporated figural elements along the way." One of the more surprising subjects that engaged de Kooning was that of the Crucifixion.

While he treated the subject on a few occasions in the first half of his career, from the 1960s and into the '70s, it seems to have become something of an obsession. "I thought some day," he said late in life, "I would paint a crucifixion like the old masters did. But I never could." Nevertheless, from at least the late 1930s, he experimented with the subject in the medium of drawing, infrequently at first, and later prolifically.

By the mid-1960s, de Kooning had embarked upon a series of Crucifixions that would continue for at least a decade. A significant number of these were made with his eyes closed, one of a number of visual strategies, including drawing with his left hand, with both hands simultaneously, and while watching television, that he employed, indeed, he watched a lot of television, and constantly drew while doing so, that he employed at the time as a means, as the critic Harold Rosenberg put it, of "circumventing his willful mind and his trained hand." "I am the source of a rumor concerning these drawings," de Kooning declared in 1966, in reference to a group of 24 of them published as a book the following year, now owned by MoMA, 16 of which are in the exhibition, "and it is true that I made them with my eyes closed. Also, the pad I used was always held horizontally.

The drawings often started by the feet, but more often by the center of the body, in the middle of the page." You see one of those on the left in this slide. In these drawings, yes, in these drawings, we find some of de Kooning's strangest, most iconographically complex inventions. "I let the pen do what it wants, without my looking, and without my thinking of anything," he said about them.

"It's funny the things that come out." In at least one of the Crucifixions, by rotating the sheet 90 degrees, from vertical to horizontal, we can see that he rendered not a Crucifixion but a Christ Carrying the Cross. Or rather, by turning the drawing first in one direction and then the other, it can be said to function, serially, as both. This simultaneity of effect, rendered blind, required a remarkable synergy of eye, mind, and hand, one largely felt and intuited.

According to those closest to de Kooning in the mid-1960s, the subject of a woman in a rowboat obsessed him more than any other although one could argue the same for the subject of the Crucifixion. The collector, John Powers, noted that de Kooning, "had seen a woman lying in a boat and was intrigued with the way she looked." He said if you paint a woman lying down and then stand the picture up, it seems to gain a height you can never get if you paint her standing up. So it's clear he is striving for a vision of woman from an entirely new perspective.

If she was lying in the boat when painted, when you stand her up, she seems to be standing, lying, sitting, or doing all these things at once. This positional ambiguity is one of de Kooning's key strategies. A series of small drawings in charcoal or pencil helps us understand the motif's evolution.

In an early sketch of the subject, on the screen, the irregular shape of the vellum seems to have determined the composition's slightly tipsy quality: the boat and its naked, smiling inhabitant claustrophobically crammed into the sheet's upper right corner. Already, de Kooning has established the observer's bird's eye view, although the boat, in the form of a shield, has not yet assumed the almond shape, or mandorla, with its religious associations, upon which de Kooning will ultimately settle. In several other drawings, we witness the rowboat's form under transformation, as it takes a shape more fully approaching the mandorla, sharply tapering at the top though rounded at the bottom.

In de Kooning's large-scale rowboat drawings, intended to function as transfers for a painting or paintings, the boat/mandorla now leans to the left. That leftward movement serves to destabilize the image, knocking it off balance. The boat's position suggests the viewer's implicit presence on the dock looking down at the moored boat and its occupant.

The rowboat's stern again traces the woman's splayed legs and buttocks. The large rowboat drawing on the right, especially, is a tour-de-force of mark-making. The figure within, suspended in a wobbling network of gridded lines, is a confused scrum of multiple arms and legs, pendulous breasts, and a duck-like face, a graphic irruption as confrontational in its way as the painting, "Woman I." Meaningfully, the woman's head is framed by the boat's internal ribbing in the form of a cross, resembling a cruciform halo.

This, coupled with the boat's mandorla-shape, suggests a place apart, a sacred space. This conflation of the sacred and profane, a metaphorical union of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, seems almost caricaturely Freudian in its implications. There's a sense of the elemental in this image of woman and water, woman in water.

The rowboat functions as both bed, profane, and mandorla, sacred, her posture of aggressive vulnerability, at once vertical and horizontal, a kind of invitation. In three large-scale Woman drawings from 1964 and '65, the underlying presence of the Woman in a Rowboat motif is palpable, especially in the first of these, on the far left, a large charcoal on vellum that appears to be preparatory for one of de Kooning's so-called "door" paintings. The door paintings serendipitously resulted from a shipment of doors for the Springs, Long Island, studio in 1964 that de Kooning only realized were hollow when they arrived.

Deeming them unsuitable, he hated them, but unable to return them, he decided to use them as the matrix for a series of tall, narrow paintings of women. He said he "wanted them to be like saints. I had the idea to paint a figure like the Byzantines and put maybe four together.

These three door-sized drawings on vellum, when placed side-by-side, give one a sense of what such a polyptych might have looked like in de Kooning's imagination. Indeed, "Woman," 1964, on the far left, staring heavenward, sports a helmet of hair resembling a halo. From at least the mid-1940s, but especially, and with greater and greater freedom, from the 1960s forward, as we've seen in his Woman in a Rowboat and Crucifixion drawings, De Kooning engaged with the friable medium of charcoal.

Perhaps no charcoal drawing more perfectly exemplifies his mastery of technique, at the same time embodying all the tropes we associate with his art, than "Untitled," 1969, the drawing on the right. Recalling his Woman in a Rowboat images, the rich, velvety, evocativeness of its magic mark-making, smudging, smearing, wiping, brushing, blending, are on full display, charcoal's versatility and flexibility manifest. At the same time, the tension between figuration and abstraction, surface and depth, play out in textbook form.

The woman emerges from the background charcoal "wash" as if floating to the surface of a pond, through a combination of brush and finger dragged through the fixative-saturated medium. If any work epitomizes de Kooning as illusionist, conjuring the rabbit of figuration out of the hat of abstraction, it is this drawing. This gives you a good sense, a very good sense of just how obsessively de Kooning used fixative on his drawings, here they are, in a photo from 1968, lined up for treatment.

In 1975, de Kooning produced a series of mellifluous, light-filled and color-saturated canvases of great beauty and sensuousness, among them the Art Institute's "Untitled XI," on the screen. Though ostensibly fully abstract, their paint applied with gestural abandon, they are, in fact, based on earlier figural drawings the artist copied and enlarged. In fact, extensive, dense drawing lies below these paintings' heavily encrusted surfaces, invisible to the naked eye, but revealed by infrared photography, as you see in this image, drawn in charcoal directly on the canvas.

Though mostly abstract, from time to time, fragments of figuration emerge from the paint like sun from behind a cloud. In "Untitled XI," for example, a pair of crimson-colored high-heeled shoes can be discerned at lower left, a full figure evidently buried beneath the sea of roiling polychromy. The underdrawings of these paintings again reveal the core of careful preparation that lies below de Kooning's most "spontaneous" productions, spontaneity, as we have seen, being something of an illusion in his practice.

In de Kooning's last great pastel, "Untitled (Figures in a Landscape)," on the left, we can just tease out a figure, right of center, striding from left to right, as if emerging from a lush landscape. A drawing dating from around 1975, "Untitled (Composition with Figures)" on the right, also depicts highly abstracted figures in a landscape, although in pencil rather than charcoal or pastel. In its crabbed scrawl, which should remind us of the allover skein of drawing lying below the surface of his mid-'70s paintings, we can discern a woman in the foreground, her head emerging from the drawing's intricate graphic web, a second figure behind her, and a dog at lower right.

Again, the magic of de Kooning lies in his conjurer's ability to summon a discernible narrative from what appears, at first glance, to be a maelstrom of windswept lines indiscriminately scrawled across the paper's surface. De Kooning used tracing of his own works throughout his career as a means of retaining a storehouse of motifs, an image bank, as it were, which he could consult and re-use in various ways, either immediately in paintings on which he was working, tracings thus propagating more paintings, or over long stretches of time, paintings made years later, stimulated by older tracings. His tracings, always in charcoal, whose powdery consistency easily transfers from surface to surface, were either copied from a painted canvas or transferred through pressure to a canvas's surface.

They served as catalysts for new ideas, or simply to disrupt what might otherwise be too effortless or predictable, de Kooning habitually erecting self-imposed roadblocks to easy solutions. Although he regularly and prolifically used tracings from at least the mid-1940s, after moving permanently to Springs in 1963, he bought large rolls of synthetic vellum, cutting them into varying lengths to make drawings that approached the size of his paintings. These were, more than most of his graphic production, "working" drawings.

He called them cartoons, and they functioned not unlike the cartoons Renaissance painters used in the production of frescoes. A double-sided vellum related, and you're seeing the two sides of that drawing on the left, and then on the previous slide, a double-sided vellum related to de Kooning's painting, "The Dancer," of 1972, on the far right, gives us a good sense of the distinctive look, the graphic morphology of these drawings. Gesture is, of course, eliminated, replaced by its simulacrum, as a map simulates actual topography.

De Kooning was searching, in these, for a form, a shape, a design to isolate, capture, and recycle. And yet for all their suppressed spontaneity, they retain something of the dynamism of their source image. The random splotches of paint often found on their surfaces is the result of the wet paint against which they were pressed, either to trace or to transfer an image.

As such, they bear not simply traces of their parents or offspring, but of paintings themselves, once again blurring the line between painting and drawing. You get a very good sense in his studio in Springs of the sheer abundance, again, of paper and of these tracings and paintings. The 1980s, de Kooning's final decade of activity before stopping completely in 1990, saw a gradual and remarkable simplification of form to a spare linearity that, at its most reductive, is a stripping down to the bare bones of pure, unmodulated line.

If, by the early 1980s, de Kooning had mostly stopped making independent drawings, it was, as the curator and art historian John Elderfield has noted, because "his paintings became increasingly more drawn productions. He no longer needed to make independent drawings, since drawing was now subsumed within the activity of painting." That complete integration of drawing and painting is the great achievement of the late paintings. De Kooning's studio assistant recalled that the artist, by this point, "was just treating paintings like a pad of paper," and another assistant claimed that "all the work from the 1980s began with charcoal drawings on the white ground of the canvas.

That white ground, however, underwent considerable transformation as de Kooning re-worked passages or scraped away or repainted areas of a canvas." The seeming effortlessness and spontaneity of the late paintings was, as it had always been, the result of careful planning, although now much of that planning was intuitive and instinctive. That instinct, calling upon a lifetime of invention of shapes extracted from that most complex of forms in nature, the human body, can be seen to moving effect in one of de Kooning's finest paintings of the '80s, No title, 1985, on the screen, a "painted drawing" that, in its radical reduction to unencumbered line, its flushing out of the non-essential, is also among his most unremittingly graphic. The painting's cool, spare palette of blue and black, its disembodied forms suggestive of the curve of a leg, or breast, or thigh, seem close to something elemental and originary, something remembered, the ghostly capture of a drawing made in air, like a jet's condensation trail, its recollection corporealized.

And so we come full circle. De Kooning's final journey, at the end of an astonishing seven-decade career, was less forward marching than backward looking, a return to his origins. The muscle was in the memory, the mind was in the hand.

The spare, fluid, curvilinear lines of the late paintings "painted drawings," "drawn paintings", exemplified by no title, 1985, that seem so insistently to privilege the canvas's surface, just as insistently appear to hover, trembling, in three-dimensional space, like sky-writing. Fill in these billowing forms though, swell their cloud contours with something solid, like rain, or better, like fired clay, and what do we have? We have "Dish with Jugs," where it all began. Who could have predicted that the three voluptuous models in "Dish with Jugs," shapely, high-waisted pitcher, zaftig jug, and wide-mouthed dish, would reach their consummation in de Kooning's final, airy, insubstantial paintings? Both "Dish with Jugs" and no title, 1985, separated by more than sixty years, fall under the rubric of drawing, the first, because it's made from charcoal, one of art's most insistently graphic media.

No one would question its status as a drawing. And yet it aspires to the condition of painting, which, through its labored verisimilitude and suppression of line and contour, it more or less achieves. No title, 1985, on the other hand, meets none of the traditional criteria for drawing, its medium is paint, applied with a brush, its surface is canvas.

And yet, it aspires to the condition of drawing, and in its undeniable graphicness, its assertive linearity, it also achieves its goal. This reversal, drawing equal painting, painting equal drawing, in its deliberate subversion, its refusing, or rather fusing of categories, is quintessentially de Koonian. That the painter, Willem de Kooning, who began his life as a draftsman, should, finally, become more draftsman than painter seems fitting.

To the very end, he remained stubbornly and resolutely wedded to drawing. It was his greatest gift. Thank you.

(audience applauds) Thank you.