Art Institute opens tribute to de Kooning drawings

Smudging. Tracing. Blotting. Collaging. Erasing. Swishing.

Showing himself to be one of the great draftsmen of the 20th century, famed abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning employed all these techniques and more to create at least 2,000 known drawings, with hundreds more used and discarded as part of his painting process.

More than 180 of his best such works from across his seven-decade career are on view through Sept. 20 at the Art Institute of Chicago. This is the first solo exhibition of the artist’s works at the museum since 1969 and the most expansive look ever at his drawings.

“Willem de Kooning Drawing” is also the first drawings exhibition of any kind in 20 years to be presented in Regenstein Hall, the museum’s main temporary-exhibition gallery, a tribute both to de Kooning’s elevated place in American art and the exquisite quality of what’s on display.

“Before there was ever an attention economy,” said Kevin Salatino, the Art Institute’s curator of prints and drawings, “de Kooning knew how to grab our attention and hold it, and that is something we desperately need now. I think AI slop trembles before de Kooning. [His work] forces us to not just look through his eyes but look more carefully at the world in a way we no longer do.”

The unprecedented variety of drawings in this show offers an opportunity for enthusiasts of the medium to nerd out. For fans of de Kooning and abstract-expressionism, the exhibition provides a fuller look at the artist that goes beyond his frequently seen paintings.

But the sheer virtuosity and beauty of these works should make them appealing even to those who know little about this artist, and the curatorial team, led by Salantino, have helped by providing an open, easy-to-follow chronological layout.

In addition, the curators have included 11 paintings,as well as a dozen small sculptures and one print, that provide a taste of de Kooning’s broader oeuvre and context for his drawings.

That the Art Institute organized this show (in conjunction with the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam) is not surprising, considering that it owns 11 works by De Kooning, including “Excavation” (1950), one of the artist’s most celebrated masterworks. The museum exhibited it as part of its “60th Annual American Exhibition” in 1951 and purchased it a year later.

De Kooning immigrated to New York from the Netherlands when he was 22. And one of the biggest surprises for anyone who only associates him with abstraction is his important early grounding in the centuries-old rudiments of European academic art, as epitomized by the charcoal “Dish with Jugs” (ca. 1919-21).

The first room includes other early realist works and also shows him beginning to wrestle with cubism and other early modernist approaches. Viewers will start to see the more animated, gestural lines that would define his later art in the graphite pencil and wax crayon drawing “Seated Woman” (c. 1941).

The exhibition climaxes with a gallery that portrays the peak of his artistic journey. There, his “Woman” series of abstracted portraits together illustrate why they are now considered some of the most iconic works of American 20th century art, despite being once viewed as grotesque and even misogynist.

As the centerpiece, the Art Institute secured the loan from New York’s Museum of Modern Art of arguably de Kooning’s most famous painting, “Woman 1” (1950-52), with its still-startling swirl of scrawls and slashes and bold, non-objective colors.

In a curatorial tour de force, Salantino and his team have largely re-created the group of drawings included in the landmark 1953 exhibition at New York’s Sidney Janis Gallery where de Kooning introduced his “Woman” series, including 15 of the 22 works believed to have been shown at the time.

A key example in this grouping “Two Woman with Still Life” (1952), a 22½-by-23¾-inch pastel and charcoal that Salantino’s catalog essay describes as “the definitive statement of de Kooning’s Woman pastels, fully resolved and as finished as any of his paintings.”

Although there are no overt narratives in these abstract works, submerged storylines run through them. Among them: the almost constant if nuanced interplay between figuration and abstraction. Another is the constant question about what is a drawing and what is a painting. So many of these works from “Untitled [man and woman]” (ca. 1947-48) to [No Title] (1985) blur these distinctions, hence the show’s title, which refers as much to the act of drawing as the result.

“You can never really define drawing with de Kooning,” Salantino said.