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Brandeis University professor and the art faculty there himself graduated at Williams College who has also studied abroad at Florence and American Academy in Rome among other places. Has been known widely for his art criticism and editorship and work for the New York Times has been associated with the Department of Painting at the Museum of Modern Art and later was chief curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and after that acting director till he went to Brandeis in 1960. He has been responsible for some exhibitions, which those of us who make and arrange and try to invent exhibitions are envious of among them that show European art today and the exhibition on Pusa and the exhibition at the Seattle Worlds Fair on contemporary art. This is just a few, he has also organized and also written on many other artists and is very well known for modern American painting and sculpture also a book on the work of van mural on arts since 1945, on Picasso, on Piet Mondrian, on modern French painting and on I think most recent Hans Hoffman who is the most recent that I have seen, which will appear at about now I think in this final form. He ha also organized a number of exhibitions, which we have had here including a show which you saw last year James Brooks painting, which originally was sponsored by the Whitney Museum and organized by tonight speaker. Talking about modern arts has always an element of adroitness connected with it tonight, thinking of reminds me of the tightrope walker who was amazing his audience and someone said how on earth you keep your balance. You will see the application of the story and he said oh it�s easy, I have the pole to hang onto. This is the essence sometimes of talking about art you have to speak metaphorically and persuade your audience. If any one has the power of persuasion and the ability as well as the knowledge and the experience to talk about it, It�s Sam Hunter who will talk now on the Kooning image and it�s influence. Mr. Parkers, ladies and gentleman, thank you very much. I hope I don�t let go the pole. I am not quite sure where it is somewhere in front of me. The painting you have here in your master piece series is certainly one of most important by the Kooning, which is otherwise saying it�s one of the most important contemporary paintings in America of the post war period and indeed in contemporary art internationally. For de Kooning is one of the prime innovators with the form of painting in America after the first world war known as action painting or abstract expressionism. He along with Pollock, Hans Hoffman, Arshile Gorky, Clyfford Still, and Rothko in other ways initiated a revolution in painting whose consequences we have so feeling throughout the world. Until three years ago when in a manner speaking the age turned with the advent of pop arch and a new kind of more blend and formal abstract painting. De Kooning was the most influential in his country and was generally acknowledge by critics as the most potent creative force. He had been identified along with Pollock and Hoffman and Gorky and Kline with a New York School and would be phrased action painting, which was coined by Harold Rosenberg, the art critic, a friend of the artist and indeed it was Harold Rosenberg recently in an article New Yorker, who settled once and for all the question which had so articulated was just whom he had in mind as the model of the action painter in his rather celebrated article of the early 50s on American action painting that appeared in art movies and is reprinted in his book and it was de Kooning. De Kooning that embodied of the virtues and also bore the burden of the desperate heroics, which Rosenberg assigned to that role and who was paradigm of the modern painter who defines himself dramatically through gesture and publicly in his art. While Jackson Pollock who matured earlier and perhaps received more dramatic attention in the press has been credited with the first breakthrough in the new American painting and by reason of his untimely death perhaps also inspired a more impressive legend. He very curiously had farthest concrete impact as an influence on his or the following generation. Arshile Gorky was always considered really to verify especially the taste by younger artist a kind of luxurious hot house garden, a bit too hermetic and exotic to find immediate acceptance among the younger generation who also mistrusted his very closer legends and alliance with the Surrealist. Hans Hoffman struggling in the early 40s for a personal synthesis found many lively and devoted students and admirers, but no mature imitators. Rothko, Still, and Newman seemed too rigid and absolute in their styles expunging detail of execution and gesture and hence violating the very drama of gesturing creation that made action painting so appealing, a form of expression to the young and rallying ground for those seeking in art a new sense of personal authenticity and a release from a servile or academic dependence on European models. It was de Kooning then who became the focus in the late 40s after his first show and then in the early 50s of the emerging energies of the more ambitious American abstract painters and its principal leader. His influence was immediately discernible in the work of artist of his own generation such as Kline, Guston, Motherwell, Brooks and in the transitional generation of Hartigan, Goldberg, Leslie, Mark O�Riley and many others too numerous to mention. De Kooning has been something of a slow bloomer in the New York avant-garde and as in his own personality a curious combination of diffidence to the point of self denial and extra-ordinary painted ambition and in fact the critic Clement Greenberg has rather text him with this ambition, his Michael Angel ambition in reviving figuration and in his concern with the human figure that we will see somewhat later when we look at the slide. The de Kooning cull and it can be called a cull, although I don�t mean it in the derogatory way developed slowly but acquired momentum with the crystallization of abstract expressionism and soon was given a historical inevitability by sympathetic critics. It was in part the result of his natural force of personality and inherent qualities of leadership demonstrated in very brilliant and articulate studio and caf� talk in part answer the need especially after the atomizing innovations in space of Jackson Pollock, the need of restoring the paintings something of its traditional appeal as essential flash and as a painterly means and not simply making it served in a radical new way as the diagram of gesture, but principally his tendency grew out of the general recognition of an unmistakable originality. He had already had a clandestine studio reputation in the early 40s, which came to a climax with its first one-man show at the Egan Gallery in 1948 and his public reputation was secured in 1950 when he showed Venice Biennale and then that same year won the major purchase award at the Chicago Art Institute for his very splendid large painting excavation. With the public exhibition of his women series in 1953, which he had actually been working for four years, his reputation became even more impressive and more controversial. Indeed he was for the time positively notorious accused because of the women series of misogyny and gratuitous violence and every sort of artistic license not only by conservative and academic critics were offended by his manner, by his monstrous assault on the female form but by members of the avant-garde who felt that this return to figuration was reasonable to the principles of abstract art. De Kooning is no longer a center of controversy of contemporary art. The general interest in innovation has shifted to another area, but he has a great deal to do as we shall see with the new imagery and the new means and new attitude but are current in contemporary art that show such extra ordinary vitality. His introduction of blatant public images and what could be described as the vulgarization, deliberate vulgarization of the pictorial means in the effort to find a viable urban vernacular that could be synthesized with the style of abstract art. These devices and attitudes that accompanied them are very much at the center of this whole new revolution of pop art of mixed media the assemblage, all the current and lively as phenomenon in contemporary painting in New York. In a larger historical sense, de Kooning in the whole period of action painting which he so brilliantly sums up and which he helped to pioneer are however still controversial. Action painting and the issues of raises have created a cultural atmosphere that are not as some journalist have held, the end of one era but rather they are the opening of the new era who is in is not yet in view. So de Kooning is not so much close of something as opened up new vistas and new horizons, which in fact his later paintings served as the metaphor for this attitude, for this sense of open possibility. And as I say pop art and even some of the new more brand formal abstraction is very much related to what de Kooning has done. The point is that de Kooning and his associates in action painting with varying degrees of originality power and intensity introduced a new and problematic quality into contemporary painting and that is the active presence of the artist in his work, so that his product not only communicates objective formal harmonies and satisfaction, but acts as a metaphor for the drama up creation itself and for certain critical problems of communication. De Kooning has renewed a device and certain attitudes has been present in art since many are give greater intensity and more radical form of Cubist and Dadaist, which is the reflexive voice. The artist watching himself making the work of art and incorporating his own agency, his instrumentality into the finished product. This has taken a variety of forms whether say in Picasso�s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, it has been allowing the successive stages of creation to stay there before you and what appears to be in coherent of this unified fashion in the work of Dadaist and allowing raw materials of contemporary life, foreign matter to stand in their first stage at it were, so you got this ambiguous going back and forth between the materials in their existence in real life and in the work of art. In this method constantly pose up back to the whole problematical quality of modern art renewed again after the war in de Kooning in other words which is that the artist is showing that the work of art is a counterfeit that is the simulated reality that is exists with a great element of risk and gamble in a kind of limbo between the real and the created. So the work of art now includes as part of its subject matter the artist attitude towards himself, towards his own culture, past artistic culture that he is absorbed in ways that I will hope to make clear in the course of this lecture. De Kooning�s painting conspicuously exhibits this decision making quality the present of the artist making the decision so that the painting is a feel and sensitive register of decision, his rejections, his affirmation. All these things that were only influenced that mask or disguise or simply did not trouble the artist awareness at all in the art of the past. Hence we can better understand how Rosenberg description of De Kooning as �an adventure into chaos� as an artist who again �dared when necessary to endure on alleviated confusion and such characterization as the following, which I think is quite eloquent and sums up to image of de Kooning, which has had such enormous influence on his own time. De Kooning did start all social roles, all fixed values in order to start with himself as he is an old definitions of art in order to start with art as it might appear through him. By their mutual indetermination, art and the artist support each other�s openness to the multiplicity of experience both resist stylization and absorption into a type. The static aim to which De Kooning applies the label no style or non style, the rise from and is the expression of this philosophy of arts and self. Our purpose of this lecture is not only hopefully to illuminate the splendid painting which you have here on exhibition Gothan News but also to try to arrive at some reasonable and relevant evaluation of the artist work generally. In the course of establishing and defending De Kooning�s work and reputation from public in comprehension and the work of the other abstract expressionist critics have been prone to exaggerate and have tended to romanticize these artist positions in a quite inevitably. Thus a certain quality of primitivistic energy has been given a great deal of emphasis by Rosenberg and others and they have built an image of de Kooning as an artist more inclined to reject and refuse culture artistic culture that is in the puritanical blood being contaminated by this stereotypes types and modulated past then an image which I think is equally and perhaps even more through of an artist who has actually positively assimilated the past through his own relevant contemporary purposes. There is an unfortunate mistake that surrounds the phrase action painting with implications of primitivism of mindlessness and simple physical empathy or engagement in the active creation whereas de Kooning is certainly one of the most refined and most cultivated of artist. He is volatile, mercurial in his work. He has not blindly iconoclastic and his work is not a defense against the threat of style or to explicit a statement a personality. Despite his gusts and fits of violence in his work, he reveals himself as an artist who innate romanticism is tampered by a civilized restraint and sense of proportion which European perhaps value more highly than we do in this country. In the slides that we shall be looking on, I would like to indicate first how much De Kooning is endeavored to 20th century styles. The revision that he has made of these styles, but these deep obligation to the European sense of art, which is so opposed to what the stereotypes about American Rome is lack of finish and so on. Indeed his forms can be shown in their development as a kind of morphological phenomena that is linked quite logically and organically with the inventions of Piccaso, of Miro, and others. Then I would like to suggest that his confusion in Rosenberg�s play or his romantic disorders if you will are less allied with the ideology of action painting then with the surrealistic experience and strategies. And we shall also consider the origins and the significance of his most famous series of painting the woman and finally his influence among the younger artist of today. Can we have the first slide please? There has been a great deal of talk about Gorky and De Kooning, particularly Gorky as the cultivated complete artist very much interested in the past, but de Kooning too has gone to the past has drawn from master pieces in the metropolitan and other museums and many of his achieves are taken or have origins in draperies for example and in figuration in the contour line of Ang and David and I am starting these two slides because I don�t think we could find two more jarring contrast or more opposite, both of which have a lot to do with de Kooning style with his manner and with his content. On your left is a drapery study, a drawing by Ang and on the right is Picasso, the famous Picasso, I think of 1929 of his born period seated bather, the one image on the left is paragon of classical beauty of the strength and control through contour and through modeling light and shade creating a sculpture of volume which is self contained and does have a certain energy inside of it quality almost of statuary. The Picasso is also rather statuary but of course Picasso is dealing with the grotesque transforming the human image and physical form into a rather painful fantasy and aggressive image something out of the unconscious suggesting primitive sculpture in particular. Now even in the Ang however, there were certain distortions, the messing of light and dark and if you looked at the longer knob as artist do look and scrutinize and intentionally certain relationship would become apparent that could be abstracted and here in a painting of the early 40s by Jack Tworkov, a very close friend of De Kooning influenced by his work. You will see another study in drapery in which a figure seated on a chair has been more or less obliterated, but the drapery is given great intensity and emphasis and takes on certain powers and properties of its own becomes almost animistic, it comes to life. It is semi sculptural, it suggests volume and depth, but also has a extraordinary nervous life, but the fact is that Tworkov and De Kooning and Gottlieb went to the old masters and extracted from them a disembodied contour line of great nervosity and intensity as low track in a sense did from real life. Now we can take this and see it in actual operation in a very typical so called action painting by de Kooning on the right, black and white painting of 1948 which was the year of his first show and the entire show as I recall was in back and white. Now the fluidity of the drapery are retained, magnified, sentence scale has changed completely and the artist moves over the whole canvas building up a really quite extraordinary image that is a combination of intimacy and our sense of the artist who made the work is very much in it. His touch, the painting as it grows beneath his hand, the intensity and vehement with which he applies pigment all give us a sense of intimacy and at the same time he has created forms of great monumentality. But these forms do have a history and no matter how much he current swarms him or how much they metamorphose in the process of painting and they allude still to the drapery if not directly then certainly it is part of the whole background of feeling and visual assimilation of forms that goes into the making of these new forms. They don�t come out of nowhere, out of in air. Now the same kind of nervous linear activity in this whiplash line and this great sense of speed of execution which becomes great part of the appeal of this new style of its improvisatory quality of a sense of immediacy that it gives and the impact has very much to do with the speed of execution and the fact that there is no separation between image and the idea that form is established the moment paint hits the canvas. This is one of the extraordinary things that action painting has given us. A new spontaneity of style or probably sociological reasons for it or may be that after the war there was a reaction, there are number of reasons, one of them might very well be if there was a reaction to the rather academic modernism related to the geometric styles and to the whole idea of beauty of being an elegant to somehow to engineering or mathematics. This is a much more vitalistic style, more intuitional, romantic and the emphasis on spontaneity too have something to do I am sure with the feeling of the artist that his own individual liberties with being encroached and being called upon by more and more conformist than mechanical tendencies in society at large. Now this development of the drapery takes on to itself also other illusions to anatomical forms to the curving forms of the human body and de Kooning in the 30s was very much involved in the human form and almost obsessively so during a number of paintings which developed very slowly, which were amended, erased, reconstructed of figures sometimes set in a kind of vacant cavern of an interior space and sometimes pushed up throttle pain of the painting and this obsession returned again in the late 40s and 50s with the renewal of this theme of the women. The forms were also very much related to some of Gorky�s form of flowers pebbles, leaves, and slippers, and obey the analogical principle of surrealism where one form ambiguously stands for many things. Now here is a further development of de Kooning form of his own specific kind of physiotomy, we have seen how it relate about one level to his actual study of old masters particularly is concerned with the kind of restless moving contour line. We have seen how he has transformed this making the form take on a kind of flesh which has to do with the pigment itself and also does allude to anatomy that suggests the human form. Behind all this is the modern or contemporary sense of the grotesque which is so violently delineated in that extraordinary Picasso painting of the seated bather. The grotesque you may remember was defined by Ruskin as the combination of ludicrous and the fearful and the ludicrous is an element of de Kooning and in particularly when we come to his women, and he himself has said that he has always felt that there was something rather hilarious about these women. They are violent or rather wild and they are painted with a kind of reckless abandon and expressionist verve, but there is also something essentially comical and the grotesque which Ruskin relegated to a lesser category combines the ludicrous and the fearful and one of the ways of exorcising fears is disposing women to present them visually and the modern artist reacts to its time to the conflicts and tensions of his time in the imagery that turns up out of his unconscious. He is not necessarily dealing with his own unconscious visit, but he is finding symbols and metaphors for a period of transition of violence and social conflict just as Hieronymus Bosch through world of fantasy. He also reflected a period of art confusion and violence. I think all of these that contribute to the character of forms in modern and contemporary art. Now de Kooning new transformations of this flowing organic shape, which we thought was related to first studies of drapery and then to relationships to the human figure would not have been possible without the organic curbing forms of biomorphism as it has been called of Arp and Miro. And here this very beautiful Miro, it belongs to Kevin Rockfeller, (inaudible 30:36) of 1934 you see translated into a brilliant decorative canvas of extraordinary intensity and of a certain spookiness to in its very sharp dramatic contrast of light and dark so that we feel the responsible figures were illuminated by a flash light, you have this kind of aggregate shaped legs and torso is compressed, condensed as it might be in the dream suggesting the human figure, suggesting other forms of life, and suggesting simultaneous aspect of profiles and full face of mixtures of floral and forms of bird life and stars and so, a typical papuri of Miro�s imaginary. It is very much related to what de Kooning has reduced to a kind of active principle of transposition and metamorphosis and de Kooning in a way has seized the life principle of these forms that in Miro think are kind of dramatist persona. Behind so many of the inventions of these abstract expressionist is Picasso. Picasso is the dynamo and powerhouse of modern imagery. His confused anatomies, his forms, his lyrical, and dramatic power had all had their effect and his attitude towards that as well � his feeling of life and art must be conquered dangerously by means of each other and that they are very much involved with each other, the action painter in their own sense of commitment, the sense of painting was a total act of very much in Picasso�s death and of course Picasso is a great inventor of form, the great magician of the modern age of the 20th century. One of the paintings, one of the images that less than steepest and most indelible mark on the artist as well as the public was of course the Guernica. Picasso�s tribute to the Republican of Spain painted after the bombing of a village of Guernica in 1937. This is a detail from that the woman was dying or the dead child carried over by the bulls whose tongue is a kind of spear point images of violence that a painter�s images of reflection and human farrow, but translated into abstract forms of extra ordinary power. I think you will see in the Miro or de Kooning, the same repertory of form. Now the fact that de Kooning has abstracted these, it does not matter because of their original part is still retained as a somatic memory as a matter of energy within the form itself and he is not a pure abstract painter. He is very impure, his art is adulterated constantly by references not only to the general vocabulary of forms in 20th century completely and recalls us to Picasso and Miro, but they way he applies paint and the way he moves his line is far from just a matter of harmonious relationships. Now surrealism has been a great source, a great inspiration in contemporary art rather under estimated I would say, Motherwell who is coming here on Sunday will undoubtedly say something about that and at one time he suggested I think quite logically that instead of calling abstract expressionism that in the early 40s it should be abstract surrealism and these American artist de Kooning among them have taken from the surrealist their formality, their automatous and the idea that consciousness should not censor the forms that are released by the unconscious in the work of art and so on and Gorky in particular was very much endeavored to surrealist. He was a surrealist. He claimed by them, although he moved on to a different style particularly in the late 40s, and here I think you see a very close association of Gorky not to mark as that�s always been pointed out but to Yves Tanguy. On the left is Gorky in the Whitney Museum and on the right Yves Tanguy the witness. The Gorky painting the forms do suggest alerted both panical and biological organisms, human reproductive organism, and acts. There is always an element of eroticism in much of surrealism. It is a kind of visceral imagery and that is very beautiful. It�s like a kind of tropical birds of some wonderful jungle bird. His form related to more ideological mineral forms of Tanguy but he turned them into gestural one. There is a great difference is of course the abstract painters in America use, repaint the reminiscence of the surrealism but made their art more immediate, more concrete in a very typical American fashion really more materialistic with function of medium became critical. In Gorky�s painting, there is a suggestion of a figure on a horse and you see the horse�s head to the far left of the canvas and some of the complexity forms to ride his tail and there is a good deal of going on in the painting and some of the forms to get some kind of curious vertebrae that also appear in Tanguy, but we certainly get the heraldic feeling from this overall design and Gorky was fascinated by figures dressed in battle of the parade costumes. He had Uccello and Piero as battle pieces of reproduction in the studio and he painted from them. Now de Kooning in turn was influenced by these qualities in surrealism and directly got them from Gorky, but there is a great difference. Gorky paintings are rather tinted, they have an extraordinary finish and they are almost sometimes they supplicate you by their access of refinement and cultivation as a normal surface of good taste and elegance and requirement. de Kooning is a much more direct and meek and powerful and physical painter. I think we see this here particularly in this small sketch for the women of 1953 on the left, which had propped up beside a famous Side of Beef by Soutine and de Kooning often speaks of Soutine and who are they, his masters, are they his admired masters and the masters of painter Venus and those were the kind of rugged power. I always think of Cezanne�s admiration and his characterization, an admiring one, he described in his that tough record of pigment. Well there is something about in de Kooning too, he very much admires Soutine�s fullness and opulent and beyond that too the identity in Soutine of paint quality with anxiety and disquiet and the elevation of the painting process and the growth of the form which is very visible, very clearly shown under the art, the elevation of that into a subject matter in its own right. Now here on the left is a wonderful de Kooning of 1949, which was in many ways the apogee, the climax of his abstract style called Black Friday and visit a small very beautiful, very delicate pastel by Gorky of 1947 � that may be water color. I think it is the water color. Here again is the contrast between Gorky, de Kooning rather more massive manipulation of pigment. Now in the Black Friday, many of the achieves that appeared in de Kooning�s earlier work that unfortunately I cannot show you are there. He would as I said a number of rooms which he obtained in a very schematic form window rectangle globes of light with a scarce ability to emphasize certain element and suppress others that were given great emphasis on the portraits of the women which returned later when he went back for the women theme. And these isolated elements become a part of a new repertory of abstract form in this painting and if you know the early paintings you can recognize them just as we recognize some of that riving nervous activity of a descent body contour from the drapery which looks so much like also related to the area of study. Now at the same time, in this early phase of American abstract paintings is a great interest in mythology and forms that suggested mythological life, more obvious in the somewhat more disreputable mythology of surrealist, which Gorky incorporated in his work and very apparent in some of the imagery of Pollock and De Kooning of this period and although it is not in this de Kooning specifically, some of its intensity is carrying over. Here is the Pollock of 1942, somewhat earlier called male and female, and Pollock was always fascinated by the sexual polarity which became crippling in his mind and of other polarities and forces, contending forces in the universe, in his own arch, and so on. Something about the same intensity is carried on to Gorky into De Kooning and we can almost feel emerging out of this extra ordinary criss crossing of paint strokes of line and form a human figure, all parts of the anatomy and something striving to be born, a class through this extraordinary turbulence of surface, that�s very active surface but de Kooning was able to build up and sustain to keep in motion with the remarkable specializing powers of his brush. De Kooning is closer to Pollock in his rawness at this period when he is to Gorky refinement. The point here I think is that mythology is left over from the surrealist and from a whole kind of traumatic for this period in American arts are linked for the first time to the act of painting itself to the unplumbed created act. This is very different from mythology as local and something limited and localized and we might try that in the work slightly earlier period, but the sense and it is true in Rothko and Still and other artist in this period that these forms are very explicit sexual references are related to mythology, the artist is showing and assimilating and he has to pass through before moving on to a more in personal and objective style. Now this engagement by a cast of characters, the wounded beast of Picasso and Pollock of mythological figures of man and beast, of superman, of forms that suggest simply fantasies come back again. It has a tremendous backlash. It is always there somewhere turning around in de Kooning and came back again with a vigor with his revival of the female, the woman theme beginning 1942 but then it went through 1953 and shown in probably the most sensational exhibition of the last 20 years that showed 1953 where he showed all the women. I think there were eight major figures in many, many sketches. You can seen the enormous power of this in the pastel at the left where de Kooning seems almost deliberately to be destroying the human form to be reeking some kind of vergence or violence on the female form. He once told me he became very inpatient with interpretations of this theme that he had always been obsessed with handling human figure, where do you stop, where do you end. How can you do it? It is possible to paint the figure today without the enormous cultural weight of abstract painting were the examples of the greatest art being in most cases, in non figurative form, and he was dealing with a problem with a problematic kind of paintings. And in doing so, of course he did express certain attitude, he said sometimes he painted the woman and he painted his own irritation, not so much with women but just irritation and I think that�s the part true that there is a quality of irritability of quickness to react for the way the lines goes, the way the color goes, and uses the figure of the woman to center his composition. Here he has two main centers in foci of interest that are used as rather synoptically form. Now quite inevitably, their relationships to other primitivistic and idol like figures are the famous one here on the rest and on the right of an early female icon, one of the earliest that is Neolithic and it is the Venus of Lespugue and the fertility figures very typical of very early fertility figures and emphasis on the reproductive parts of the female anatomy and it is a very powerful sculptural form and also most interesting symbol that returns again and again and you have a magnificent abstract or formal ahead by Marticee with the Tiara and that�s very close to figures of this kind, and here is the torso, but again gives emphasis to the female form as a fertility image, as a kind of primitive cull idol as a lily. Now these mutilations and modifications of the human form are far less painful or distressing than they are as a surrealist. And De Kooning, it was a matter of exigency of what was necessary to keep the whole surface alive and in dynamic operation and of course his problem was to paint and to make as part of the subject matter, the dynamics of the painting process. And I said earlier that he is not as primitivistic as perhaps he has made out to be and I think as you become accustomed to palette you see these almost taunting beautiful passages in translation that flash pink against the green blues that occur again and again in de Kooning was dragged whites and so on. But only de Kooning can carry they are done with extraordinary elegance sees a combination of violence and elegance. Here with another painting in all of this time of two women is another fertility figure and a famous one known as the Willendorf of Venus. Again it is Neolithic and I can see the exaggeration of the form and it is rather similar to De Kooning, although de Kooning wasn�t aware of this when he painted his own painting. He said that there is a chronicle element in the women and if we combine the primitivistic qualities of the early fertility figures and the set of gaga expression of the Picasso you get close to what de Kooning is getting it. There is a sense of the hilarious or a word has become popular since de kooning began this, the absurd. We know that in the theater the absurd and the dramas of UNESCO and we know it from the writing of camu and the sense of absurdity, which is very much a part of de Kooning�s art is the sense that the absurdity of men�s faith and all his fails and the in contingency or woman and woman is the symbol for this same condition, the human condition is a sense of absurd. Absurdity exists in the world where the belief in all the institutions has evaporated to some degree. We recognized that any way as a quality in modern art and particularly in the post war period. Other artists have also dealt with this quality and a rather haunting way, Cherche Midi in this portrait of his mother done in 1947 gives us a sense of no scale as de Kooning in Rosenberg�s phrase or his own phrase I should say in his own style, we don�t know where we are. In other words, the artist is disorienting us quite deliberately as Cubism did in a systematic way in the post way period without the formality of Cubism, the artist also is disorienting us. Your subjective location is called into doubt and becomes an issue in this painting. The scale of the figure and its relationship of the space behind it and the way figure disappeared and doesn�t quite exist. These are all existential problems of our time that are translated into artistic metaphor. In the painting, the figure in lost in matter. Again a certain emotional factors attained and de Kooning finds in a more vital painterly fashion, I don�t mean to making the videos comparison about the quality, the relative quality of two arches. I think it is interesting in terms of the two culture that de Kooning paints his way out of a corner and Dufy in spite of his primitivism is very much involved in the culture of painting and paint matter. There is a very great quotation I would like to read to you by some Paul Tillich, a well known protestant theologian about this disappearing image of man and painting, which has a great deal to do with de Kooning�s manipulations of pigment and his destruction and reconstruction of the human image with losing the image and matter with Cherche Midi�s curious juggling of the human image and his way of dematerializing it. When in abstract painting and sculpture, the figures disappears completely one is tempted to ask what has happened to man. This is the question which we directed our contemporary artist and in this question, one can detect an undertone of embarrassment of anger and even of hostility against them. That said we should ask ourselves what has become of us, what has happened to the reality of our lives. If we listen to the more profound observers of our period, we hear them speaking of the danger in which modern man lives. The danger of losing his humanity and becoming a thing about the things he produces. Humanity is not something a man simply has. He must fight for the new in every generation. The fact that the work of art depicts the negative side and the fight for humanity is in itself a fulfillment of the high human possibility. I think there is a great deal of truth in that statement and that is directly applicable to many phases of modern art. There is another very beautiful Cherche Midi and it is so fascinating because a good photographer has put one of these emaciated figures that are rather related actually to certain phases of sculpture. Out in the open and you can see how both monumental it becomes and how it almost disappears. It�s a sculpture that creates it�s own environment in a curious way and it has very little to do with the space we live in and yet by being a figure inevitably the cause to our own space and therefore creates this confusion and this confusion about relationship makes us think about the human condition or done through fascinating special metaphors. I just wanted to show that De Kooning in his own way also creates this battle ground, this storm in which man exists very precariously and de Kooning is a kind of orgiastic but the human images threaten in the same way by the artist ability to manipulate paint. And here is your picture that is which is a kind of structural reprieve of it getting into De Kooning�s influence, I think the power of that painting is in the way it is made that you cannot separate the execution from the image that emerges and the paint becomes form when I said before it hits the canvas, the manipulation of pigments are part of the subject matter, which in turn makes the painting a record of an act. So the act of creation has brought very close to us and we are very much involved. We have become participant in the drama of the artist making the picture. Now the other things that are fascinating about the artist has used news print which he has transferred pulled off and left on the painting about to create textural relief and interest and I think for other reasons that will emerge in a moment. It is very hard to see on the slide along the left margin or at the top in particular, I don�t know whether there is actual news print embedded in the paint or whether it has been pulled off. It�s really very hard to tell and the fact is that he has gone back to the material, the textures, the foreign matter of the contemporary urban environment and in a sense this is De Kooning�s meeting for the present date just as for a while it�s figure paintings seemed to set in a whole new burst of figure painting particularly in California that has become much too hyperesthetic and has not led to any particular development except some of good painting, but what De Kooning did in this painting and has had enormous consequence in this painting and others. The pursuit of the kind of blatant public image in the women series and he actually worked from to begin with photographs and reproductions of Marilyn Monroe and other idols so on is the beginning of an identification on the part of the artist with very public images, which finally had come down as in pop art. There is another element here and you can see some of those beautiful color combination that sort of flash paint set against the jarring yellow and the typical and it is usually ones the blue green passages seems to be much too blue would be settled new answers. These passages that seems to raw here but again as you become accustomed to it, you see that a massive skill on the way he has done it. He has also set very powerful, almost very simplistic color combinations of red, white, and blue like the American flag and this red, white and blue and I don�t know whether we got it from the flag but it became a typical color combination of Larry Rivers who then began to paint the flag. The first painting of patriotic theme of Washington crossing Delaware and then actually painting the theme for the last veteran using the flag, and finally became the whole basis of the painting itself in Jasper Jones where he identified the entire surface of the canvas with the flag. So what I am trying to suggest is de Kooning moving towards more blatant public image in the women and using news print again and then even this color combinations has moved closer to a more common fund of imagery and to actual common places the cliche�s of contemporary existence, which the artist today now has a exploited unmercifully. We get almost too much in Americana seems to me in pop art and in any case the beginning of this shift in artistic culture began with De Kooning and has been used by other artist to just use as social comment and freedom as has been used with foreign materials that come out of the fabric of that cities that show the impact of commercial culture and expandable art or pop art, popular culture, low art, and high art has become the basis of adjunct sculpture so called, some of which is absolutely marvelous and has become a commentary on the whole periodical nature of our culture. The idea of obsolescence for example which is so important if you buy cars every year or two where it�s built in art of the automobile. There is a sealing that everything is expandable and that America is so dominated about this that we were scare fully aware of it and our culture is essentially periodical and that we basically believe that all is deserves to parish and have something new in its place. We speak of plant obsolescence, but it�s more than plant � it�s a state of mind and you will see now De Kooning is not engaged himself in these games and riddles about obsolescence and temporary American culture. He is primarily a painter who is very physical, his spirituality comes out of the physical manipulation of the paint, but he has the power to draw onto himself many of the ideas and actually to initiate the creative ideas at this time which is often used in many ways by using Kolas element, by using these more blatant color scheme and by turning them around on this extraordinary fashion creating a very powerful and rather romantic image just as a contrast the painting of almost in same period I think 1955 or 56 is carried by James Brookes, which you had here with the Brooke shelf and it shows how whopping in the crisis and de Kooning which are crises of the personality existential feeling become static in Brooks and are turned into static and pictorial problems, which are handled very beautifully or rather more even tampered smooth and you get a very harmonious and chromatic effect, a very lucid composition with only a kind of fringe of the expressionistic fury that one feels in De Kooning. Brooks was very directly affected by De Kooning. Another aspect of De Kooning that has a great impact is the way he not only manipulates spaces with these liquid transition in oil but actually tears up forms and realize readjustment in the Kolas, this one is actually called red eye, and passage you can see how directly influenced who was by the manner of almost turning the painting into a sculptural problem of fragments. And here you move for this kind of composing and juxtaposition of forms in the actual use of raw material or foreign materials to the medium and plastic surfaces and use of material that suggest in Robert Malory, a very good sculpture called red collage in 1960s, very much adopted de Kooning and a very dramatic relationship is in Chamberlain, the man who uses broken taxi, a taxi cab an automobile and combines them into sculpture with something of the laxity and the nerve and the expressive power of de Kooning. I thought it would be interesting as because there is a certain relationship in color to show and show another attitude towards the machine in the case of Picabia on the left of some 50 years ago or half a century in the past since the Dadaist and this painting called Amerist Parade in 1917 was made at the time when there was a great deal of kind of infatuation with the machine and the with the adventure of the machine civilization and also a certain atmosphere of the ridiculous the absurd, the hilarious, and the fantasy and it�s not like a Ruth Goldberg as the machine that does function but very curiously and has certain analogies with Amerist acts or with two human forms as the kind of theme that run through Dada and so very clearly at least the machine works and there in the Chamberlain you have the machine in the graveyard of the machine are concerned with it with the artist transforms and in the sense redeems by his arch. It is interesting transition I think. Now De Kooning, his brush work that wonderful sensuous that you see it here in two paintings and you see how it has changed and I don�t mean to imply De Kooning directly responsible for what has happened in art or he be the last to say himself and he will deny it. There are elements that were taken by other creative artist and made into a different idea, so here the Larry River has taken the De Kooning style and transplanted it on a magnified small scale but magnified image of a cigarette packets, and the organizing framework becomes the object. You see there is much more concern with the object and there is wonderful Jasper Jones on the right and again the De Kooning freedom and spontaneity and the many of this color combination becomes the brush work De Kooney�s brush work is a kind of classic and it�s part of repertory in modern painting now in a painting by John which however plays off the free and spontaneous Mark, Paint Mark and so on against mechanical elements. The object represented by two wooden balls, the painting is called the painting with two balls and the lettering at the bottom in which he gives you the title of the painting. De Kooning is very behind that but he would never of course have foreseen what his own experiment might lead to and here is an --- |
