Willem de Kooning and Italy, Accademia, Venice — review: a brilliant, bacchanalian show

“Villa Borghese”, the famous landscaped gardens celebrated in slashes of rococo pink and sandy yellow, verdant greens and pools of blue, is the painting of ecstatic memory which Willem de Kooning made on returning home to New York from Rome in 1960. It is a star of Willem de Kooning and Italy, a brilliant, bacchanalian exhibition just opened at Venice’s Accademia which stole the limelight during the Biennale’s inaugural week. As the show’s poster image, “Villa Borghese” beams out everywhere, pasted to bridges, waterbuses, across the weathered walls of windswept piazzas. De Kooning, luminous, fluid, opulent, is utterly at home here, both in the watery city and among the fleshy Titians and Tintorettos he loved. 

The exhibition — de Kooning’s first European museum show for nearly two decades — is a persuasive exploration of how Italy changed the Dutch-born American painter’s art, twice. It deepens understanding of the paintings and is groundbreaking in placing his sculptures, begun in and responding to Rome, centre stage. 

The bronzes are explosive and also comic, forces of nature which echo, amplify and set free the figures held within the two dimensions of canvases. The sculptures’ craggy, gnarled surfaces, bearing the marks of the artist’s kneading, gouging, squeezing the clay, correspond to the paintings’ liquid, slippery tactility. In both, de Kooning deforms and reforms, builds up, scrapes down, because the body “is nothing unless you can twist it around like a strange miracle”.

The brawny dancer with massive outstretched arms, “Cross-Legged Figure” (1972), and “Hostess” (1973), leaning on the bar with a brassy grin, legs flowing off the pedestal, one hand raised as if holding a cigarette, are nonchalant breezy characters who could have walked straight out of the tall, vertical wet-on-wet paintings of figures in a landscape “Woman, Sag Harbor” (1964) or “Woman Accabonac” (1966).  

The long-limbed “Small Seated Figure” (1973) thrusts and writhes in front of the splay-legged “Woman on a Sign II” (1967), huge buttocks, breasts, cheeks, outlined red. “I can’t get away from the femaleness — those breasts are such great shapes,” de Kooning said. He enjoyed parodying the explicit female figures in American 1960s billboard advertisements — in his youth in the Netherlands he was a sign-painter — but Mario Codognato, who curated the exhibition with Gary Garrels, draws comparisons too with Bernini’s “Ecstasy of St Teresa” in Rome: the dynamism, erotic current, the figure abstracted within folding drapery. 

Throughout, contemporary references meet classicism. A centrifugal, compressed “Floating Figure” (1972) posed for lift-off suggests an astronaut, and also of de Kooning’s response to Michelangelo’s “contraction of the body that great artists are aware of. Everything returns to the centre, the figure floats from the centre.”

Among Abstract Expressionists, de Kooning alone was interested in tradition. Friends complained that he bored them talking of “the Venetians, and their brushstrokes, their brushstrokes, no one could do better brushstrokes” — and that was before he even visited Venice. He arrived there pursuing a love affair; it turned sour and within days he moved to Rome, which “made an enormous impression”; he returned quickly for a long stay in 1959-60.

The “Black and White Rome” drawings, expressive, architectonic abstractions in black enamel, mixed with ground pumice to soften the shine, sometimes torn and reassembled in collages with broken, overlapping planes, respond to the city’s architecture and layers of history, and to its liveliness emerging from wartime destitution. Created in artist Afro’s small studio, which had no natural light, they are experimental and improvised, pulsing to the urban whirl, the nightlife, suggesting excited glimpses, passages from sunlight to shadow characteristic of strolling in Rome.

It was the year of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, and Rome’s avant garde coming of age. De Kooning was scooped into circles around Galleria La Tartaruga — Cy Twombly’s graffiti paintings, Jannis Kounellis and Fabio Mauri’s black and white collages, Alberto Burri’s iron cut-outs. They feed into the drawings’ monochrome intensity and fragmented aesthetic, but de Kooning’s path was different; he sensed that Rome was “preparation for new paintings where I would like to do ‘everything’: the natural reality and the abstract gesture”.

Back home, he painted the grand trio of “abstract pastoral landscapes”, whose broad brushstrokes, odd truncations and superimpositions develop from the Roman works, and sustain their looseness and atmospheric freedom. They are reunited for the first time here: “Villa Borghese”, “A Tree in Naples” — frothy blue lapping waves, warm reddish-brown earth — and the hot pink/creamy yellow “Door to the River”. Its vigorous gestural marks balanced by delicate feathery strokes, with grey slivers between the hefty verticals leading into the deep space opened by the “door”, it alludes to Long Island, but carries Italian memories. Elaine de Kooning wrote that her husband “adores Rome, the doors are so big and you feel so welcome”.

He returned in 1969, guest of the Spoleto festival — the sinuous “Spoleto” drawings including keyboards in mid-flight, have an energy and openness referencing the promenading theatre performances of Orlando Furioso staged there. In Rome, a chance meeting with an old acquaintance, Herzl Emanuel, who invited de Kooning to work at his foundry in Trastevere, was decisive — his introduction to sculpture. The first 13 small untitled pieces, coiling, sensual, anthropomorphic, recall figures interchangeable with water on Bernini’s fountains.

In the early 1970s de Kooning concentrated on sculpture, reaching a pinnacle with the primeval figure wading from the mud, fused with it, “Clamdigger”, inspired by diggers on East Hampton’s beaches. It stands guard here, majestic, bathetic, humane.

Like Picasso, de Kooning used sculpture to work out new moves in painting, and these voluptuous bronzes share space with the great limpid, pellucid abstract paintings referencing the sea which followed them in the mid-1970s: “Screams of Children Come from Seagulls”, “North Atlantic Light (Untitled XVIII)” — highlights of highlights.

The coda, a room of large abstractions 1981-1987, which become simpler by the year, begins with the beautiful spontaneous/controlled “Pirate (Untitled II)” from MoMA, floating bands of colour across patches of glowing white, and ends with the abbreviated red and yellow doodles “The Cat’s Meow”, on loan from Jasper Johns. 

An old man’s scribbles or a last extravaganza? In this context, the swooping lines, bulging volumes, decorative patterning and free-floating forms are a final expression of the vitality and baroque splendour, with its undercurrent of transience and mutability, that initially enchanted de Kooning in Italy. Of its church interiors, he said “I remember everything half suspended or projected into space; the paintings look right from whatever angle you choose to look at them. The whole secret is to free yourself from gravity.” So he did. To see a quarter-century of his ever-evolving art, then walk a few minutes to Titian in the Frari and Tintoretto in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, is a rare joy. 

To September 15, gallerieaccademia.it

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