Willem de Kooning at L&M and Gagosian

Willem de Kooning ignored the insulting bafflement of old age as he plunged into a last decade of explosive productivity; between 1983 and 1985 he produced more than 50 paintings a year. The airborne radiance of that work was celebrated this fall in exhibitions at L&M and Gagosian galleries. Both shows provided ample opportunity to marvel at the muscular inventiveness and comic lyricism of these last works, which continued their forceful evolution until illness finally shut him down (he died in 1997, at 92).

The Gagosian show, curated by Klaus Kertess, emphasized links and continuities with de Kooning's earlier career, while the L&M show focused exclusively on developments between 1981 and 1986. De Kooning's late paintings established inter-pictorial dialogues with his earlier work through the use of tracing, projections and freehand copying. The vocabulary of forms in Fire Island (1946), Orestes (1947) and Woman (1953), all included in the Gagosian show, was later enlarged and simplified in cartoon-like ways. Sometimes de Kooning looked at a drawing or reproduction held in one hand while painting with the other in order to inject the earlier forms into a new picture. Toward the end, assistants would project a drawing onto a blank canvas to get him started.

Untitled XIX (1985), at L&M, features a swerving tangle of red and blue lines buttressed by antic yellow shapes. A stylized yellow teardrop is limned in red, white and blue as it pulls toward the painting's right edge. A pastoral whiteness both floats between and buoys the colored elements. De Kooning used a spackling knife to give the ground the power to exert pressure on the line's cursive itinerary. These late paintings groom his earlier collisions of paint into a torqued choreography of mutually defining forms.

A skeptical grace inflects de Kooning's sense of purpose. He was always proud of his workmanlike intimacy with materials and techniques, but his gestures serve a pictorial wit in which expectations are systematically derailed. De Kooning's work, from the beginning, made unequivocal assertions about contingent states of presence; his marks dynamically build forms and unravel them in ways that are surprisingly sexy. The biomorphic parts relate to each other as an erotics of adjacency in which boundaries are nudged and jostled with slippery urgency. The visual puns of his "Woman" series, in which a torso could become a face or slur into a landscape, relax in his late works to register the internal pressures and imperatives of his process.

Both the Gagosian and L&M exhibitions track the last chapter of de Kooning's lifelong investigation into pictorial coherence. He famously referred to himself as a slipping glimpser, indicating both his preoccupation with small perceptual moments and his embrace of the accidental. The athleticism of his glimpsing, though, and the comic timing of his slips, in the late work, change the sense of that original self-characterization. He became a practiced master in control of a big vision. Meanwhile these last works have none of the weight and death-awareness sometimes associated with Late Style. De Kooning collapses Kierkegaard's notion that we live forward but understand backward; it appears that dementia lightened his burden of memory without impairing his historically informed forward drive.

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