On those rare occasions when I choose to read a big, fat, thick-as-a-brick book about a famous person, I usually pick one about a politician. David McCullough’s Truman is a great example. I tend to gravitate toward books about political figures because, in the course of reading about their lives, you also get a free history lesson. That is, the story of Harry Truman is also the story of World War II, the atomic bomb, Korea, the founding of Israel, and the Berlin Wall.
Biographies of artists are more problematic, for me. I just finished reading de Kooning: An American Master, by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan. It chronicles the long life of the great painter—a life barely contained within the span of the Twentieth Century—in which de Kooning lived to be the celebrated, Grand Old Man of modern American art. He became, in fact, the only American artist whose figure and reputation approached those of Picasso.
And yet his story is limited to three settings: Amsterdam, where de Kooning grew up; Manhattan, where he had his first studio; and the Hamptons, where he spent his later years. Despite his brilliant mind and voracious appetite for art, booze, and sex, de Kooning led a remarkably insular life for such a prominent figure. He spent most of his time hanging out with other New York artists, including Jackson Pollock, de Kooning’s friend and main rival. de Kooning seems to have had no interest in politics, family, culture, or even people in general. Rather, he was an artist whose obsessions were limited to one great theme—the mystery and magic of the female body.
I found myself totally absorbed in Steven’s and Swan’s graceful, passionately written biography of this great, extremely flawed, man. In the course of reading it, I was reminded of what Joseph Campbell said about the journey of the artist, that it is essentially a heroic journey—a struggle between the artist and the demands of mainstream society. In Steven’s and Swan’s telling, there does seem to be something quietly heroic about de Kooning, who lived in poverty for more than half his life (well into his 50s) before gaining any tangible measure of fame. He was constantly in debt to friends (most of his early “sales” were actually donations from friends), and he often stole food from the local auto-mat. But de Kooning never gave up his quest to create art that was both beautiful and horrific, palpable and sublime. As Stevens and Swan write of de Kooning’s most famous painting:
With Woman I, de Kooning, emboldened by his abstract works, reopened his attack on half-buried problems, both formal and emotional. ….He had become fascinated with Mesopotamian figures, themselves excavated from the distant past, and with other ancient deities. “I had seen a picture of a Mexican goddess,” he said, “to whom hearts were sacrificed.” Such an image seemed to him contemporary as well as ancient, a powerful Everywoman of many guises…. She could be open-ended and mysterious, from ancient Mesopotamia and also modern Hollywood. She could owe something to Picasso’s women but also reflect the symbolist deities that filled the art of de Kooning’s youth, muses who often absorbed and possessed men. She could be mother and wife, monster and lover, a creature at once earthbound and hallucinatory, grotesque, cruel, monumental, cartoonish, and funny—a contemporary goddess who could possess the viewer, but could not, in turn, be possessed.
Powerful stuff. There is, of course, a strong suggestion in the book that much of de Kooning’s artistic force stemmed from his complicated, somewhat dark relationships with the many, many women in his life. First and foremost on this list is de Kooning’s own mother, Cornelia, a imposing, earthy figure who ran a bar in the Red Light district of Amsterdam. Like Frank Sinatra, who spoke openly of his life-long terror of his mother, de Kooning seems to have had a deep fixation on (and dread of) his. Though he saw her only a handful of times after leaving for America in the 1920s, she seems to have permanently inspired (perhaps “traumatized” is a better word) de Kooning, and there can be little doubt that Cornelia’s ghost haunts the mythical women of his paintings.
The other prominent woman in his life was the artist Elaine de Kooning, to whom he was married for over fifty years. Like his mother, Elaine was a tough, smart lady, with whom de Kooning seems to have shared little love after the initial years of their relationship. Yet it was she alone—unlike the countless girlfriends and mistresses that de Kooning pursued—who seemed to know how to handle de Kooning. They lived in separate house for most of their marriage—indeed, often in separate parts of the country—but Elaine provided much support and stability to de Kooning during his fading years, when the artist became stricken with Alzheimer’s disease.
Only one of de Kooning’s notable relationships—with his longtime girlfriend Joan Ward—produced a child, Lisa, whose upbringing in the shadow of her father was troubled and (one guesses) fairly heroic also. de Kooning’s evident love for his daughter—though often punctuated by moments of bad judgment and neglect—is one of the man’s few redeeming personal qualities. Many of the book’s 630 pages are devoted to de Kooning’s indefatigable drinking, smoking, and womanizing. At one dizzying point, well into his marriage with Elaine, he was was juggling two mistresses in New York, a long-distance affair with a woman in Texas, and sporadic encounters with young art groupies who frequented his studio.
I lost count of the women in his life, whose number included Ruth Kligman, the former girlfriend of Jackson Pollock (and the sole survivor of the fatal car-crash that killed him). I also lost count of the many back-room abortions de Kooning arranged for his lovers over the years, which Stevens and Swan enumerate with ruthless dispassion. It’s interesting to note, however, that none of these women has anything particularly damning to say about de Kooning, even in retrospect. In the end, de Kooning seems to have been a energetic, funny, profoundly intelligent man whose talent and basic decency outweighed—barely—his enormous selfishness.
(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.)
Ash Clifton, Writer 