134 CALVIN TOMKINS moment, though, nobody seems to question the idea of an art museum as a social center, a magnet for crovids of people with an hour to kill and a generalized belief in the benefits of high culture. And in this respect, asin many others, Dallas undoubtedly reflects the thinking in other parts of the country. June 13, 1983) MANET AND DE KOONING ‘If modern art began with Edouard Manet, it may very well have ended with Willem de Kooning. Of course, there is no absolute proof that modem artis finished, in spite of all the recent elegies. A great deal of contemporary painting and sculpture seems at first glance to come straight out of the modernist hopper, and so far nobody has been able to define for us exactly how it has gone on to become something else. All the same, the de Kooning retrospective at the Whitney Museum, following so closely on the heels of the great Manet exhibition at the Metropolitan, does look in many ways like the end of the modernist story. The road that Manet opened when he made art itself the subject of his own art—the road followed by so many of the great modernists — reaches with de Kooning a sort of heroic dead end, which subsequent artists have had to find a way out of. I can’t remember seeing any two major exhibitions that commented more fluently on one another, or on the last hundred years of visual art Viewed in such proximity, Manet and de Kooning turned out to have more in common than we might have thought. Virtuoso painters, deeply rooted in older traditions of art and determined to do work that would hold its own against the art of the muscums; charismatic per- sonalities who stood somewhat aloof from the movements that they helped to inspite; radicals in spite of themselves, who managed to shock and alienate both the avant-garde and the conservatives with paintings ‘of women whose brazen attributes offended taste on several levels at POST-TO NEO- 135 ‘once—they would surely have appreciated each other's company. A world of social difference lay between them, of course. Manet was a grand bourgeois, impeccable in all matters of personal style, a frequenter of the Café Tortoni and all the other elegant and socially correct places to be in the Paris of the Second Empite and the Third Republic. Charming, generous, witty—“direct and exuberant about everything,” according to his fellowartist Berthe Morisot—he seems to have been a walking example of those qualities that we think of as superlatively Parisian, although it also appears that none of his many friends knew hhim very well, De Kooning's background was light-years away in tone— lower middle class, dour, Dutch. His father was a wine and beer dis- tributor in Rotterdam, his mother a barmaid when they divorced, the father got custody of Willem, but the mother took him away by force and eventually had the custody order reversed. De Kooning held on to certain working-class attitudes for years after he came to this country, 1926, as an engine-room wiper aboard an English cargo ship. Until 1935, the year he spent on the W.P.A. Federal Art Project, he thought of himself as a workingman who painted on the side, and several of the eatly paintings at the Whitney are portraits of himself or his friends ‘as workets—melancholy figures in drab, Depression clothes. To his intimates, though, it was always clear that de Kooning was an aristoctat. “He has an aristocra’s sense of irony and manners,” the critic Thomas B. Hess, who knew him well, once wrote. Others have noted the wit, the generosity, the charm, and the attractiveness to women. With al their social and aesthetic gifts, neither Manet nor de Kooning took the path of easy success. “T work out of doubt,” de Kooning has said, putting his finger on one of the keys to understanding his work Doubt, uncertainty, contradiction, the emphasis on becoming rather than being, on process rather than completion, on the joumey rather than the arrival—this is the intellectual climate of de Kooning’s Abstract Expressionism, and of one whole area of modem art as well. The indeterminate path that dissolves in the turmoil of de Kooning’s raw pigment is not so easily discernible to us now in Manet’s work, but it was apparent to Manet’s contemporaries. Music in the Tuileries, the picture with which Manet concluded his apprenticeship to Goya, Ve- lézquez, and other Old Masters and declared his own radical aesthetic, ‘was considered crude and offensive to the eye when it was shown, in 1863, in Manet’s first one-man exhibition in Paris. Emile Zola, Manct’s136 CALVIN TOMKINS. friend and defender, later recalled that “an exasperated visitor went so far as to threaten violence if Musie in the Tuileries were allowed to remain in the exhibition hall.” What viewers disliked in 1863 was not so much the pictute’s jarring color contrasts as its sketchiness, its lack of “nish,” Manet’s technique of painting in “patches” of color, which annoyed the critics of his day, has a highly finished look to our eyes. ‘The glossy, resonant blacks of the men’s top hats and their long jackets, the flashes of opulent color in the dresses of the seated women, the ‘animation of the outdoor scene give us, if anything, a sense of how much painting lost when it ceased to mirror the physical world. Manet’ contemporaries, more aware than we are of how far this picture departed from familiar compositional devices and visual conventions, found it disturbing, arbitrary, crude. Their discomfort rose to something like fury when they were con- fronted, at the famous 1863 Salon des Refusés, by Le Déjeuner sur T'Herbe. This modernist icon was not in the Metropolitan show, and neither was Olympia, painted later the same year; the Louvre refuses, quite understandably, to let them travel. Their absence left a huge gap, for in these two paintings Manet made a peculiarly modern ambiguity the centerpiece of his art. The point of focus in each is a naked woman whose frank, open, and slightly mocking stare is directed unmistakably at the viewer, drawing him or her into the highly equivocal scene and demanding a response. It was evident that Manet, in his Déjeuner, was {quoting from the Old Masters—principally from Giorgione’s Concert Champétre (which is now attributed to Titian). But what on earth is going on in this updated version of a pastoral scene, and how are we to respond to it? Two young men, fully dressed in fashionable clothes of the eighteen-sixties, sit discoursing on the ground of an obviously fake forest while their unclothed female companion looks neither at them nor at nature but at the viewer. The same woman stares out at us from Olympia (literally the same one; Vietorine Meurent, Manet's favorite model at the time, posed for both pictures), but here she is cleanly a prostitute, poised on deliciously white sheets for her client. It is not hard to see why viewers at the 1865 Salon, where Olympia was first exhibited, resisted so strenuously her thin-lipped invitation. Was Manet baiting the public? Considering his lifelong desire for success at the Salon, a deliberate provocation on his part seems unlikely. Never- theless, these two paintings delivered the coup de grace to academic Salon painting in France, and announced the modem artis’s new POST-TONEO- 137 | demand: the viewer must enter into the world of the painting, decide for himself, with no help from tradition, how to interpret the work, and (as Marcel Duchamp suggested some yeas later) complete the creative act that the artist had begun. It is as though Manet, having accepted his friend Baudelaire’s chal- lenge to be a painter of modern, urban life in al its transitory aspects, had decided to throw the challenge right back at the onlooker. Modern lifein the industrial era implied fragmentation, dislocation, uncertainty, risk; it was full of ironic and inharmonious details—like the black cat arching its back at the end of Olympia's bed. The “heroism of modern life” that Baudelaire referred to in a famous essay required the recog- nition that there were no longer any comfortable certainties, in life or in art. It is Manet’s constant awareness of this situation that makes his paintings, to me, more profound and satisfying than those ofthe Impres- sionists, whom he never quite joined in spirit or in fact. ‘The human subjects in Manet’s paintings after 1860 have an air of alienation with which we ate only too familiar. Theodore Ref, a leading Manet scholar, has described Manet's aesthetic milieu as “a world of strangers adrift in a seemingly limitless space, who are cut off severely at its edges, reflected ambiguously in its mirrors, remote from each other even when seated together.” This is the world of A Bar at the Folies-Bergére, Manet’s last great painting (finished in 1882, the year before he died, at the age of fifty-one), a painting that disturbs and confuses us as powerfully as it draws us into its shiRing, smoky light and skewed perspective. Here we can be sure of nothing except the sloriously painted still-life in the foreground—the certainty of objects. ‘The central figure of the young barmaid has a vacant expression that ccan be (and has been) interpreted in a dozen different ways. Whom is she looking at? Is it the top-hatted man at the extreme right, reflected in a mirror? If so, why is he placed at that impossible angle? The shimmering, blurred figures in the background co-exist uneasily with the precise foreground details—the bottles of Bass ale and of liquors and the compote of mandarin oranges on the marble counter. Seeing the painting at the Metropolitan, I thought it struck a chord of mala of corrupted beauty, but that could have been my own contribution. It isa painting that changes as we look at it. The painters of modern life—a category from which I exclude Mondrian and other artists whose concern was almost exclusively with the formal138 CALVIN TOMKINS properties of line, shape, and color—have all had to come to grips with the isues that Manet raised. For de Kooning, the metaphor of modern life became painting itself. Ina statement on "What Abstract Art Means to Me,” which was read at a Museum of Modern Art seminar in 1951, de Kooning said that for him and for certain other artists painting “is a way of living today, a style of living so to speak’ is where the form of it les.” His own life and his own way of working had by then become the model for countless New York alist, including those who struggled hard (as Rauschenberg atid Johns did) to bieak away from his influence. De Kooning was a legendary figure in the New York art community long before he had his frst one-man show, at the Egan Gallery, in 1948. His refusal to show work until he thought it was ready; the immense difficulty he had finishing a picture (dozens of canvases that looked magnificent to his friends were scraped off and re- started, over and over again); the depth of his knowledge of European art history, and his quirky brilliance in discussing it—all this was as impressive to other artists as the paintings that he did manage to finish. De Kooning’s influence was and continues to be greater than Jackson Pollock's, although it was de Kooning who, with typical large-mind- edness, said that the seminal achievement of Abstract Expressionism had been Pollock's: “Jackson Pollock broke the ice.” Younger artists in the nineteen-fifties used to imitate de Kooning's mannerisms as well as his swooping, calligraphic line; one of them even took to wearing a black wool seaman’s cap like de Kooning’s, and to speaking with a Dutch accent. At that period in New York, when contemporary art was a matter of serious concern to no more than fifty non-artists, de Koo- ning’ aristocratic poverty and his total dedication to painting as “a way of living” served as a moral lodestone; he seemed to establish for every- cone else the integrity of advanced abstract art. When Excavation, an abstract oil painting into which he put all he had learned in fifteen years of work and experiment, won the major prize atthe Art Institute of Chicago's exhibition of painting and sculpture in 1951, the entire New York avant-garde felt vindicated. By then, however, and to everyone's astonishment, de Kooning had turned away from pure abstraction and started painting his Women. Shock waves fanned out in all directions, comparable in their way to those set off by Manet’s Déjeuner and Olympia. Didn't he know that the human figure was something you could no longer use? Georges POST-TONEO- 139 Mathieu, a Paris artist embedded in his own form of gestural abstraction, cabled the Artists’ Club in New York to protest de Kooning’s betrayal of the abstract cause, A few people saw beyond the shock waves. The Museum of Modem Att bought Woman, I, the fist ofthe series —a Picture on which de Kooning had worked for nearly two year, seraping and repainting and scraping the image off again, For three weeks in 1950, the canvas had lain crumpled in a cornet of his studio, until the art historian Meyer Schapiro came in one day and de Kooning pulled it out to show to him, and then started to work on it again. Neither Woman, I nor Excavation, which is owned by the Art Institute of Chicago, could be borrowed for the Whitney retrospective, and their absence is roughly equivalent to the absence of Déjeuner and Olympia from the Manet show. More than a dozen post-1950 Woman paintings and a great many drawings are on view, though, each one surprisingly different from the others, and the emotional impact of these violent, scarfying images is the high point of the exhibition. Even now, thirty years later, de Kooning’s ferocious, grimacing, wildly distorted Woman paintings tend to make people reach for psy~ chiatric explanations. De Kooning must hate women, they say; his ‘mother really had it infor him. This sort of reaction probably has more todo with the viewer than with the artist. Like Manet, de Kooning was commenting on past art—going back all the way to prehistoric fertility figures and Mesopotamian idols. He also cartied the image forward to nineteen-fiftes cigarette ads, Fourteenth Street shopgitls, and Marilyn Monroe. “I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity,” he told the 1951 MOMA seminar. What really disturbs us about his ‘Woman series is the same thing that disturbed Manet’s contemporaries about Olympia: there she is, looking straight at you, appearing and | disappearing in those storms of dragged, seething, yet somchow perfectly controlled color, demanding that you get into the painting and come to terms with her. Is the viewer expected to re-create the experience that de Kooning had when he painted her? I don't think so. De Kooning’s art is not really autobiography, after all. It is too open-ended, too deliberately unfinished for that. De Kooning himself once complained to Tom Hess that in all the verbal hooha over Woman, J nobody had noticed that it was funny. Certainly humor is there (de Kooning is one ‘of the few great artists who make room for humor, Manet is another), along with what the critic Irving Sandler has described as “the anxious,140 CALVIN TOMKINS rootless, and violent reality of a swiflly paced urban life.” You, the ‘onlooker, are expected to thrash around in that painted reality, with your autobiography as a guide. Reality in a de Kooning is very different, however, from reality in a Manet. Although Manet is looked upon today as te fist artist to make painting itself the subject of his work—and thus as the progenitor of the modemist dictum that a painting should be a thing in its own right, and not just a representation of some other thing—he also concerned himself toa very large degree with the physical world, and his dazzling Skill in representing that world is what drew the enormous crowds to the Metropolitan show. The same thing could be said, toa lesser degree, of Picasso and Matise. It cannot be said of de Kooning. The space in de Kooning’s pictures, the pictorial context, is what de Kooning calls a “no-envitonment.” It is an ambiguous, shifting space, impossible to get your bearings in—a space that is a reflection of the artist's mind. In this sense, itis also a cul-de-sac. Why is de Kooning’s art still so difficult for a public that accepts, say, Roy Lichtenstein? Much of his painting since the Woman series has been rooted in landscape, that ‘most durable of popular favorites. De Kooning’s mastery of color and his sheer painterly skill are certainly comparable to Manet’s. It used to be said of Picasso that he had the best wrist in the business; by that token de Kooning has the best shoulder—nobody around today can match the authority of those broad, sweeping brushstrokes, which for thirty years have been synonymous with the “look” of Abstract Expres- sionism, What is it, then, that makes de Kooning's appeal a relatively narrow one? ‘The question leads back, I think, to that mote general issue the end of modern art. De Kooning is stil with us, stil painting, stil upholding the integrity of advanced modern art. Compared with the paintings, drawings, and sculptures in the Whitney retrospective {twenty-four bronzes that he did between 1969 and 1974 ate also on display), nearly everything produced by younger artists in this country and in Europe during the last ten years looks trivial. There is more to be seen, more complex activity, in one square inch of a de Kooning than in an entire show by some of our current art stars. The Whitney retrospective, in fact, may turn out to have an unexpectedly adverse effect on the vogue for Neo-Expressionism, which depends to such a large extent on the achievements of previous generations of artists. What postmodem art POST-TONEO- 141 lacks, it seems to me, is precisely de Kooning’s sense of painting as a way of living, as something that matters absolutely—more than rec= ognition, or career, or life itself. Art replaced life for de Kooning, and for certain others of his gen- eration. The process had begun before the turn of the century, when artist after artist decided that it was demeaning to imitate, or “represent,” the natural world. Hlusion came to be seen as fraud. Painting became its own raison d'étre, and the artist —the kind of artist, a any rate, who chose to deal with “modern life”—came increasingly to identify that life with the experience of making art. For de Kooning, carrying the process to its furthest point, reality resides exclusively in the paint on the canvas. Those sun-dappled, slightly hilarious beach gies in his post- 1963 paintings, those color-drenched hints of landscape in the later abstractions are all that is left of a world other than paint. They are the residue of what de Kooning has called his “slipping glimpse”—that ‘momentary flash of something seen out of the corner of the eye, that fractional nod by an intelligence that does not wander from the canvas in the Long [sland studio. Real life is somewhere else—on the other side of the impenetrable curtain that modem art had become: (Bebruary 6, 1984) THE SPACE AROUND REAL THINGS ‘One of the principal honors of the academic life in America is to be hamed Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. The annual appointment, which requires the appointee to give a series of six public Tectures, is predicated on a very broad definition of poetry; its recipients have included T. S. Eliot, Igor Stravinsky, Ben Shahn, and R. Buck- minster Fuller. The 1983 Norton lecturer was Frank Stella, a forty- “¢ight-year-old abstract painter whom many people consider one of the