Astrid Dick on De Kooning’s Late Paintings: NY Hip Hop, Lettering, and Expressionism Interrupted

Willem de Kooning, Untitled X, 1985, Oil on canvas, 70 x 80 inches

“To make something that you will never be sure of, and no one else will… that's the way art is.”            
—de Kooning, 1971

Though seemingly dying out, the caveat about dementia still surfaces in discussions of Willem de Kooning’s ‘late paintings’—most recently during Endless Painting at Gagosian Gallery in New York, a remarkable survey show where six of these works could be seen in all their glory.

After a period marked by slowing down, drinking, and depression, de Kooning came back in the early eighties like a miracle: healthy, reunited with Elaine, and with tremendous productive focus and, judging from documentaries of the time, sharp-witted and still requiring subtitles to translate his Dutch-accented English. The so-called late paintings—at least those exhibited so far, though many more exist—were created circa 1981-1986, after over four decades of an intense painting practice.

Nothing new under the sun: old age, madness, or blindness—whether Vincent’s yellow cadmium consumption, Monet’s cataracts, El Greco’s astigmatism, or Titian’s senility—are often the reassuring explanations whenever artists deviate from expectations.

When I look at de Kooning’s 1980s paintings, the association with street graffiti is so blatantly obvious that I’m surprised to find no such mention in art reviews, as if this were of no scholarly interest. Markings on public places—from Greek graphein (“to write”) to Italian graffiato (“scratched”)—are ancient, but street graffiti as we know it began in NYC subways around the 1970s. Painted in the darkness of the night and traveling the entire city in daylight for all to see, the train car graffitis triggered a major civic ‘war on graffiti.’ Along with rapping and ‘breaking,’ graffiti became one of the expressions of hip hop culture —writing, speaking, and dancing— emerging right around the time of de Kooning’s last metamorphosis.

Brooklyn Breakdancers / Rockaway Parkway Yard / Tag by Seen, 1985

De Kooning was trained in Rotterdam as a craftsman and didn’t consider himself an artist until his mid-thirties—not from lack of confidence, it was an attitude. During his eight academy years, “he accomplished the demanding rhythms of lettering,” which he preferred crisp. Bill famously loved visual popular culture and urban advertising. He created numerous murals for the Federal Art Project that we can only imagine now, and painted innumerable signs for a living. Elaine de Kooning called him the most visually aware person she knew, constantly pointing out everything from the ‘magnificent’ Coca-Cola sign to gasoline stains on the floor. Look how he toys with letters in the remarkable Painting (1948)—NY hip hop style!

Willem de Kooning, Painting, 1948, Enamel and oil on canvas, 42 5/8 x 56 1/8 inches

Rhythm and crispness are crucial in both lettering and graffiti, where slight variations in size, weight, slope, and width can radically affect readability and look. It’s a total commitment to line, proportion, negative and positive space management, shape, grids, punch, and tools. You venture slightly out of ‘line’ for emphasis or a popping effect; you use thick or thin brushes or ‘caps’ to create specific marks. It doesn’t take much to see de Kooning’s drawing practice as a kind of writing—his own graffiti ‘throwie’ made of letterforms, shorthand, and asemic writing. Add the body, and you have similar muscle memories in both de Kooning’s paintings and good old graffiti on a subway car.

From the 1940s through the 1970s, de Kooning’s paintings—whether more figurative or abstract—tended toward messy, thick, oily impastos with broad gestural brushwork.  They founded and defined abstract expressionism’s bravado. The late paintings present a stark contrast: thinly painted with curvy lines and delicate, erotic transparencies. They are related in rigor like traced drawings of previous structures. The enclosed white areas remind me of de Kooning’s dictum that “even abstract shapes must have likeness.” They are both opaque and translucent, creating constant reversals in depth.

Willem de Kooning, …Whose Name Was Writ in Water, 1975, 76 x 87 3/4 inches

Take the spellbinding …Whose Name Was Writ in Water (1975), painted in white tints enclosed by sensuous, weighty brush lines ‘written’ in dark carmine, blue, and green. The primary-colored Milkmaid (1984) and Untitled X (1985) relate to this earlier piece like stripped-down versions. These late paintings represent a decisive, bold move—a discontinuity like Matisse’s cutouts.

One afternoon around the time he painted Milkmaid, de Kooning shared a dream from the nap he had just taken: “I was standing by myself, looking out a small window. Inside it was very dark, but outside the sun and the stars were high in the sky, making everything glow with an unreal light. There was a green meadow with a milkmaid in it and she was poised looking at me. I kept thinking how quiet it was, so I waved, but she didn’t seem to understand, and I suddenly felt childhood memories rushing into my head. I thought I heard her say ‘Who is?’ Then I felt an awful melancholy.” For his final act, de Kooning went for maximum restraint, summoning viewers to stand before his paintings and daringly inviting us to fill in the blanks.

Willem de Kooning, Milkmaid (Untitled X), 1984, oil on canvas, 77 x 88 inches

Perhaps he found so much expression superfluous after all. What need had he anymore for fist fights with the canvas to prove ‘I am a man?’ In 1982, viewing Woman I (1950) at MoMA, he found it funny that his younger self took to the task so seriously, and rather agreeing with the charges of misogyny, he reflected: “I get a little scared myself.” At the same time, he remarked that such seriousness is what it takes to make a painting, like an old professor regarding his young student who has no idea what he's doing but is endearing in his cocky, absolute commitment.

Perhaps he thought of Philip Guston’s recent passing. Wasn’t de Kooning the one guy to see the guts and risk in his friend's last-call turn to figuration? The greats John Cage and Morton Feldman’s hurtful ostracism during Guston’s opening night at Marlborough rebutted by Bill’s embrace of “it’s all about freedom!” 

Maybe Bill got tired of all that jazz, American supremacy, and his own pathetic alcoholism.  Perhaps he felt he’d paid his dues. No longer the need for endless, tortured revisions of scraping, layering, smudging, dripping, messing up. Just a few confident, spare lines encircling exquisitely luminous tints of expansive space. Red, yellow, blue, and white—coming full circle to Mondrian, “our compass”—and a nod to his friend Gorky who died too soon. Loose brushstrokes of freedom, like marks from a spray can. No time for refinements or the cops will chase you out. Paintings that look advanced today, and something more than the last chapter of an artist heir to European modernism, or a personal stripping away of noise.  Willem de Kooning’s final paintings feel more like a tack—badass breaking his way out of the room.

Astrid Dick, Piétinner (Complementaries for P.M.), 2024, Oil on canvas, 84 x 70 inches

Astrid Dick is a painter based in Paris.