Willem de Kooning once pronounced that “Style is a fraud,” adding, “I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns.” Confronted with the restless array of styles found in the twenty-seven drawings on view in this significant and wholly engrossing show, one was tempted to swivel one’s head in disbelief. How could someone who approached drawing from so many angles, and whose pencil expressed so many moods, deny style? The answer, of course, was in the evidence before one’s eye. A limpid commercial drawing, abstract interiors, calm linear portraits, frenzied semi-abstract figures: what connects all of them is not a retreat from style but an unwillingness to settle for a particular way of looking. The undulant, parabolic curves that in Untitled (Mechanical Interior) from the late thirties connect circles and spoked wheels also describe the swell of hips in his drawings of women in the fifties, and, one recalls, those same curves float free of description in his late abstract canvases of the eighties. The style in all these works varies, but the identity of the man who made them remains as identifiable and constant as his signature. In a lecture, de Kooning once confessed that “The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.” Style may be a fraud; it was by rummaging through stylesthat he sought his sense
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Exhibition note
On “The Artist’s Hand: Willem de Kooning Drawings” at Mitchell-Innes & Nash.
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 20 Number 8, on page 52
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