ONE DAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGES AND WILLEM
WILLEM DE KOONING, EXCAVATION, 1950
AND
GEORGES SEURAT, SUNDAY AFTERNOON ON THE ISLAND OF LA GRANDE JATTE, 1884-86
(Art Institute of Chicago)
I went to Chicago to be seduced by Seurat. Instead, I was destroyed by de Kooning.
Expecting a crowd, I arrived at the Art Institute half an hour before opening time and was the first visitor through the doors. I flashed my member card (purchased not to support the museum but to save money on admission fees; as aesthetes go, I’m one cheap bastard), walked swiftly up the main staircase, through a door, past a brilliant blur of Renoirs, down a corridor where a few Degas pastels caught my peripheral vision, and came to the rather small Post-Impressionist gallery where Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte occupies the entire back wall. Everything was perfect. The gallery was deserted, the museum was quiet, one of Western art’s most important and best-known paintings was all mine. I felt like a Bond villain who had just attained his dream of world domination. Here at long last were those optimal conditions for the experience of art that are so depressingly rare in large public galleries. It was fantastic.
Recalling all those people lined up on the front steps who were even now making their way to the ticket counter, I decided to make the most of my limited time. First of all I noted that the colors looked somewhat muted, less impressive than I recalled from previous visits. Standing at the far end of the gallery I noticed the light/dark contrasts of shadow and sunlight more than any brilliant coloristic effects. This is a major problem with the work, because Seurat’s signature technique–little dabs of paint placed close together–was specifically intended to increase the brilliance and luminosity of individual colors. Without this effect, the raison d’être of style and work disappears. Time, which will eventually fade all paintings, has already seriously damaged this one. Scanning the big canvas, I noticed how the central woman’s cylindrical hat makes her look like a caryatid supporting an entablature of foliage, an effect both foiled and reinforced by her parasol. I saw how the flattening caused by the high horizon is counteracted by a too-rapid recession into perspective space–so rapid, in fact, that it makes the boats on the river look like models or mechanical toys. The parasol pole and walking stick of the large couple in the right foreground are arranged like the hands of a clock, and the central woman’s figure assumes the fashionable corseted shape of an hourglass. Tick, Tock. It’s Sunday afternoon, shadows are starting to lengthen, and time is running out for these (mostly) middle-class citizens. Tick, Tock. The whole world of this painting is mechanical. Seurat’s people are like Victorian wind-up toys, automatons in the park doing the Dance of the Wooden Parisians. I walked up close to the canvas and noticed the variety of Seurat’s brushwork, from short, choppy strokes in the foreground grass to horizontal dashes in the water to the tiny, delicate strokes and dabs that give volume to the figures in the middle ground. Despite what everyone says–even while standing directly in front of the painting with evidence to the contrary before their eyes–La Grande Jatte is not ‘all dots.’
And then the children came. At first, well-behaved groups of children on elementary school field trips came to the gallery in waves, and I could still study the painting in the troughs between. But there was no possibility of the kind of sustained viewing necessary for any deep experience of art. It’s impossible to study a painting when every five minutes a different docent appears and stands directly in front of the work to deliver the same error-ridden spiel to a different group of school kids. (‘Docent,’ from the Latin docentus, meaning ‘one who knows nothing about art.’) I attempted to tune out the world and concentrate on the canvas, but I found myself viewing the same passages and thinking the same thoughts over and over again, trying to re-connect a thought-train that had been forcibly and repeatedly uncoupled.
After about an hour, even this fitful thinking became impossible. The Art Institute started to seem like a hellish mutation of the Barney show: large groups of children much too young for this sort of place were running, yelling and screaming through the galleries. Their teachers must have brought them here solely to let them run wild. Supervision was nonexistent. All was chaos. Masterpieces of Post-Impressionist art became the painted backdrop for a preschool version of Lord of the Flies. The noise level was incredible; earplugs wouldn’t have helped. All those people on La Grande Jatte seemed a mile away. There was no possibility of contact.
Stoically, I endured. A promise of lunch eventually lured the children away and things quieted down. I studied the painting in relative peace for a while and slowly came to an unexpected conclusion: A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is not a great painting. I don’t think this is merely sour grapes attributable to the deplorable viewing conditions. This painting lacks an essential element that all truly great works of art possess: inexhaustibility. It boasts a cast of dozens, but it does not contain multitudes of meaning. If La Grande Jatte were a novel, critics would call it flat, one-dimensional, caricaturish. It lacks the art historical wit of Manet, the social observation of Caillebotte, the psychological depth of Van Gogh. And next to the Art Institute’s brightest and most flowery Renoirs and Monets, Seurat’s carefully placed and calibrated colors look rather dingy. La Grande Jatte is pleasant and interesting but not profound, charming but not enthralling. Whether the culprit is the artist’s static, detached style, the fading of his pigments, curatorial overhype, critical overestimation or a combination of all these factors, this most famous Seurat lacks the intense power of the greatest art. It doesn’t compel our attention; it doesn’t break out of its glass and force us to sit and stare and think. It is very good, but it doesn’t fascinate us endlessly. In the end we can walk away from La Grande Jatte and it will probably not haunt us.
The same cannot be said of Willem de Kooning’s Excavation.
After a quick lunch I made my way to the distant galleries where the Abstract Expressionists are kept in Siberian exile, prophylactically far from the crowd-pleasing Impressionists at the heart of the museum. Excavation hangs beside Jackson Pollock’s late Grayed Rainbow in a spartan room near the end of one wing. A very good, colorful Joan Mitchell hangs across from it, and in the next room a big, bright Mark Rothko glows like the sun through morning haze. In contrast to the Monet, Renoir or Seurat rooms, these are not galleries where people stop and look. During the hours I stood in front of Excavation, no one else gave the painting more than five or ten seconds. Most visitors strolled into the room, recognized Pollock’s name (de Kooning’s also rang a few bells), grunted noncommittally and walked calmly on. And as in all modern art galleries there was the usual contingent of well-dressed know-nothings publically proclaiming their ignorance with remarks like "Anyone could do this!" before a Rothko or "He’s just wiping his brushes on the canvas" in front of an abstract Philip Guston. A few years ago I would’ve found such people maddening, but now I see them as upholders of the grand tradition of American philistinism, lineal descendants of those Art Institute students who burned Matisse’s Blue Nude in effigy when the Armory Show came to town.
They are probably better off not looking at Excavation. If they don’t look too closely, they will be neither challenged nor disturbed nor terrified. They will look up, see a large piece of weird abstraction and look away. They will not be forced to deal with the painting. Keeping one’s distance is the best way to avoid the power of art.
If we, however, decide to confront Excavation, to plant ourselves in front of it and look at the canvas until it begins to reveal its secrets, we see a painting that only appears to be as abstract as the poured Pollock it hangs beside. After a few minutes of sustained viewing, recognizable shapes begin to emerge from the flattened field of curving and darting lines. We see eyes–the large, wide, staring eyes characteristic of Modernism since Les Demoiselles D’Avignon. Big eyes painted in black and white like the eyes of Garbo or Bacall magnified on a movie screen. We also notice the large set of clenched teeth on the left side of the painting, drawn in profile with a child-like naiveté. After a minute or so, we begin to perceive figures, very strange figures, bizarre biomorphs with distorted bodies and terrifying faces. At the upper right a large hammerhead creature with two prominent eyes and a blood-red mouth with sharp fangs looms threateningly above us. Its strange, shark-like head rises on a thick, powerful neck and seems to pull away from the paint surface and invade the viewer’s space. It is a shocking, fascinating figure, a memory of a mercifully forgotten nightmare returning to haunt us during the day. And just as the hammerhead cannot close its eyes, we find it hard to take ours away. This figure is balanced on the left side of the painting by another strange monster that I call the ‘conehead’ for the massive protuberance atop its skull. Possessor of the aforementioned clenched teeth, the conehead is shown in sharp profile, its rigid lines and pointy angles contrasting with the hammerhead’s more slithery curves. As I stand before the painting I read the hammerhead as a female form and the conehead as male, but these are merely vague feelings probably based on the traditional gender associations of straight and curving lines. While both figures look ahead to de Kooning’s famous Woman paintings, they seem to have no obvious sexual characteristics, neither the lumpy, harnessed breasts of Woman I nor the phalluses visible elsewhere on this canvas. These two most prominent of the work’s figures seem sexually indeterminate, even genderless. Suitably strange inhabitants of a very weird world.
The significance of de Kooning’s title soon becomes clear: multiple acts of excavation are required simply to see his figures. Action painting calls for active viewing. Like all great Modernist works, from Joyce’s Ulysses to W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo, Excavation asks us to participate in its creation of meaning, to draw the necessary conclusions, to make connections. Here we must follow de Kooning’s lines and excavate his bizarre figures from the painting’s yellowish ground. The act of seeing is the act of making forms visible within this flat field of liberated lines.
Our excavation can begin anywhere on the canvas, so let us start at the hammerhead. Looking again at this figure, we notice a thin, curving line that passes between the creature’s eyes, snips the right corner of its mouth and continues down to the base of the neck. Such is the form-creating power of de Kooning’s lines that we must ask ourselves if the hammerhead is a single form or two overlapping biomorphs, each with one visible eye. The left contour of the hammerhead’s neck curves down to a wide-open mouth filled with blocky teeth. This belongs to a large, very obscure creature (or creatures) that appears to be sitting atop the diamond shape near the bottom of the painting. (While this diamond might represent the figure’s bent legs, a perfectly legible leg and foot immediately to its left suggests otherwise.) The long, sweeping curve of this creature’s back is also the contour of the upside-down form to the right, providing a good example of how de Kooning achieves the extreme compression of this canvas: most of the painting’s lines perform multiple duties, delineating at least two different forms and thereby eliminating the empty spaces between. Accordingly, the lower right edge of the diamond shape is also the back of a snarling comic strip dog that stands on the painting’s lower border and faces right. With its triangular body, blocky legs, pointed rabbitty ears and barrel snout, this would be a truly silly figure if it were not so aggressively drawn. Its sharp, cutting angles and snarling mouth foaming drippy black paint transform it into a sadistic, bloody-minded graffito: Beware of the Dog. Farther down, at the bottom right corner of the painting, yet another mouth opens wide, this one belonging to a Pac Man-like creature into which the letters of de Kooning’s signature cut like the teeth of a saw. In this position, and with its single black eye, the form seems a prediction of the eyes that will stare up at encroaching chaos from the corners of Philip Guston’s late works. But unlike Guston’s figures, this creature is more than a painterly witness to overwhelming events; it’s an open mouth ready to gobble everything down.
Working our way back up the painting, we see that the dog’s ear is also the mouth of an upside-down form with one eye visible to the right of the diamond shape. Inverted and with its legs spread like the slaughtered oxen painted by Rembrandt and Soutine, this figure appears to be either giving birth to, or eating with a second mouth, the strange assemblage of biomorphs immediately above. I wrote ‘biomorphs,’ but it’s unclear whether this passage portrays two opposing figures (one above the other), two creatures consuming a third between them, or a single complex biomorph feasting on itself. Whatever the configuration, two appendages that curve out of this complex toward the left are connected to the body of the hammerhead. That is, the figures on the right seem to be eating part of the hammerhead’s body. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say. To the right of the hammerhead’s neck is a vaginal opening that seems to gush bloody red paint while an obviously phallic shape penetrates its lower edge. Not easily connected to any of the surrounding forms, this seems like a free-floating emblem of defloration, menstruation or sexual violence, a disturbing icon of pleasure and pain.
If we mentally divide the painting into three vertical sections, the middle third is the most difficult to understand. The concave shape at the top may be yet another mouth opened wide to the ‘sky,’ but what are those vertical patches of pink and purple just below it? The bright yellow passage beside them seems equally abstract until we connect it to the form below and it becomes the yellow crest of a bird that might have flown in from a painting by Arshile Gorky. (Is this de Kooning’s tribute to his recently deceased friend?) Beside and overlapping the bird is a thick V shape that appears to be derived from late 1920's Picasso (but what it means here is anyone’s guess). And below this is a bright, right-angled patch that seems like a void in the middle of the painting. Amidst all of these overlapping forms, in the exact center of the canvas, this bright splash of red, blue and white comes like a release from the work’s unbearable flatness. It may be the most colorful and inviting void in all of Western art. It seems like a glimpse of space, a small preview of the abstract ‘landscapes’ de Kooning would paint ten years later. But before we can escape from this painting, before we can squeeze through the hole and run off into space, a few thin black lines that criss-cross the colored patch bring us back to the surface, back to the Excavation.
At the bottom center of the canvas is an easily identifiable window with a cracked pane of glass–or is it? The two verticals we read as a window frame might instead be the schematic legs of whatever figure is constituted by the swirling paint and heavy lines around the central color patch. To the right of this possible window we see a phallus that positively oozes black paint; above it, the same black substance drips from the upper teeth of an open mouth. Welcome to Willie de Kooning’s Chocolate Factory, a place closer in spirit to William Burroughs than Roald Dahl. Atop the window sits another phallus, a graffitoesque cock and balls that seems as disembodied as the penis and vagina in the upper right. A thin line of de Kooning’s black semen trickles from its tip, but our attention is drawn upward to the thick dark line that the penis has apparently traced across the surface of the painting. From the tip of the penis, the line curves upward, passes through a blurry patch, curves down, then swings up again before finally turning sharply down. A typical de Kooning line, painted by a willie. This passage, almost hidden among the jigsaw puzzle of forms and lines, is the interpretive key to the entire work. For Excavation is penis painting, an attempt to capture the imagery of pure instinct, a delineation of uncensored desire. All the instincts we suppress and sublimate to survive in society are here put on parade. Spread across this large canvas is the dark side of the human unconscious, the terrors of the id, nightmares from the animal brain. The very idea of black semen is a stomach-turning nightmare image: an ejaculate with the color of diseased shit and the consistency of diarrhea. But it’s more than just a bit of sicko surrealism. It is an original, poetic image for de Kooning’s use of line. In this painting, line is seminal; it is the stuff that creates forms. It gives image to the unthinkable, unspeakable drives we harbor deep inside.
Continuing our excavation, we see above the penis-drawn line a figure with bulbous legs, a serpentine body and the painting’s most bizarre head. On the front of this head we seem to see two eyes separated by a red orifice; to the right is a thick, red, Marilyn Monroe lower lip and part of a toothed mouth (or these may belong to another creature entirely); to the left is a truly fearsome open mouth with fangs the size of walrus tusks. The conehead stares up at these fangs with understandable apprehension; now we know the reason for its clenched teeth and the worried, nervous look in its eye. Below the head, the conehead’s body curves sharply to the right and discharges two thick streaks of red and white paint. If semen is black in de Kooning’s world, shit can be the color of blood and milk; the conehead is literally scared shitless by the big white fangs of the creature above. Like much of the painting, this passage has an over-the-top, melodramatic, almost cartoonish quality; it’s 120 Days of Sodom illustrated by Chuck Jones. And it’s no less terrifying for this; indeed, the cartoonishness may add to the painting’s power. The goofball ultraviolence of cartoons and old comic strips may be an accurate reflection of the atmosphere of the human unconscious (for many of us, cartoons may have played a role in forming that atmosphere). Anyway, it all looks less cartoonish and more sadistic when we see the bloody goatee on the conehead’s chin and the flecks of red around its mouth. An eater is about to be eaten. Continuing downward, we find that the lower contour of the conehead’s body is also the top of an enigmatic creature with a long snake-like body and a head shaped like a star. The thick black line that defines this creature’s left side also delineates the right side of a large, standing humanoid figure at the left edge of the canvas. The pointy-headed monster has already swallowed most of this standing figure’s arm in its upturned V-shaped mouth.
All of these gobbling and threatening mouths, prominent teeth, staring eyes, this multitude of figures compacted into a shallow space–it all seems vaguely familiar to me as I stand in front of the canvas at the end of this first excavation. Where have I seen this before? I remember the heap of overflowing bodies and open mouths in Brueghel’s Fall of the Rebel Angels. A connection could be made, but it’s rather weak. And then I recall the vision of Hell at the bottom of Jan van Eyck’s Last Judgment panel at the Met. Of course. Van Eyck’s overloaded, sadistically detailed scene of sharp-toothed, wide-eyed demons devouring and torturing their human prey is a distant but obvious ancestor of Excavation. The Van Eyck entered the Met’s collection in 1933, so de Kooning had ample opportunity to view it during his Manhattan years, and some aspects of the fifteenth-century vision–the monstrous, open-mouthed head in a bottom corner, the dog-like creature that stands at the bottom of the panel, the central lizard-like demon–have nearly direct analogues in de Kooning’s painting. I seriously doubt that these similarities are coincidental. De Kooning strips away the religious trappings of Van Eyck’s vision and reduces it to essentials: line and paint and motion; terrifying figures in a terrifying place. De Kooning cuts through the older vision of Hell and creates a new, modern one for the twentieth century, an Inferno equal parts Freudian imagery and Darwinian cruelty. He excavates down to the source of all hells: the sadistic fantasies that reside in the unplumbed depths of the human brain.
In addition to being a landmark work of the New York School, Excavation must be seen as one of the great monuments of Surrealism. Here is enough "pure psychic automatism" to send André Breton running for a priest. This is the unconscious unbound, a fluid, messy panorama of psychological terrors that makes the works of the canonical Surrealists look altogether too tasteful. Everything we repress is projected here on the movie screen-shaped canvas of de Kooning’s sadistic cartoon. This is bedrock, the end of the excavation: interlocking images of instinctual horror, images of the unconscious drives that determine all human creation and destruction. Here are the basic drives to eat and fuck and dominate, the amoral human dynamos that power art and war, conflict and communion. Experiencing this painting is like lifting a rock and seeing all the bugs that swarm on the flattened ground beneath; we are surprised by how much strange and unsettling life exists in the darkness. And then we remember that this darkness is inside us. Both frightening and absurd, Excavation is a vision of the aggressive, fascistic will-to-power on parade.