Princeton University Art Museum show focuses on de Kooning’s explosive ‘Breakthrough Years’

“Town Square” can be seen at The Princeton University Art Museum as part of the “Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945-50″ exhibition.

How abstract was de Kooning, anyway? For very good reasons, he is considered a great groundbreaker and a tilter against convention. Pieces he painted 75 years ago still feel radical. Yet compared to his fellow New York abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, his work often feels downright comprehensible. Pollock, famously, complained that de Kooning had betrayed the movement away from representational art by reintroducing the figure.

Pollock may have had a point. “Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945-50,” a revelatory show now up at The Princeton University Art Museum, presents the artist as a master of suggestion whose vision transcends any particular style. These 22 paintings brilliantly balance shape, color and gesture, and highlight de Kooning’s revolutionary approaches to the line and the mark.

Though it is possible to appreciate the show on that technical level alone, it is unlikely that you will. That’s because objects, and plenty of them, haunt these canvases. Stare at these madly energetic paintings and figures will emerge: faces, edifices, bodies, crowds, articles of clothing, automobiles, street signs — the panoply of urban life in the middle of the 20th century, in a place as dynamic, upsetting and invigorating as Manhattan.

Willem de Kooning’s “Gansevoort Street.”

The clearest example of this is “Gansevoort Street,” a play of dark streaks and great smears on a brick-red background. It’s an abstract painting, but it’s also a cityscape. It may also be a social statement. At the time of its composition, Gansevoort in northern Greenwich Village was at the heart of New York’s meatpacking industry. De Kooning’s highly impressionistic painting is an emotional snapshot of the area as it might have struck him at the time, full of high and inaccessible windows, alleys, pitched roofs and entranceways, with a bloody undergirding to the whole scene. Animal shapes stand in three corners of the canvas. Curved black lines meet at sharp angles suggestive of chopping blades. The point of one of these axes seems poised to fall on a bovine figure that stands as upright as a man.

This is not to suggest that de Kooning had a political motivation for picking up a paintbrush. It’s just an observation that he was oriented to the world around him in a way that many of his peers in abstraction weren’t. His planet is our planet: he’s just got an extremely allusive, wonderfully sideways manner of showing it to us. When looking at a de Kooning, there is never the sense that we are in an uncharted netherworld, or adrift in a vast plane of ideas, or caught somewhere inside the artist’s head. His vision may be outrageous and unruly, but it is human-scale.

In “Dark Pond,” de Kooning treats us to an arresting display of black shapes outlined, thinly, in white. The painting comes on like an uproar: thick, sinuous fields of black paint, energetic chalkboard scribbles, and geometric shapes suspended mid-image. So much energy radiates from the piece that it can be hard to orient yourself before it. But once you do, it becomes awfully recognizable. The diamonds and pentagons look like doorways and windows lit up at night. The mushroom shapes in the foreground begin to resemble trees; the angled shapes in the background suggest the pitched roofs of shacks. A large blank field at the bottom of the canvas takes on the fathomless quality of a lake in the woods.

Willem de Kooning’s “Dark Pond.”

Seen from one perspective, this complicated painting turns out to be the dark pond that de Kooning tells us it is — no more and no less.

Are other interpretations possible? Naturally. This was (and still is) experimental painting. De Kooning doesn’t aggressively foreclose any particular way of looking at things, and he doesn’t impress meaning on us with a heavy hand. But there are many clues in his art that lead us to believe that whatever it is we are looking at, it fits our perceptual capacities.

When he takes us outdoors, as he does in “Dark Pond,” what he shows us is roughly the size of our field of vision. When he coaxes us inside, the objects we encounter are rather humble. Human figures, no matter how spectral, are about the same size that we are.

“Mailbox,” for instance, is a cascade of curved lines — some thick, some warped, and some partially erased, both underpinned and overlaid by drips and smudges of pink and yellow paint. It seems at first blush like de Kooning at his most inscrutable. Yet there is something welcoming about it, too, and after a few seconds of exposure, it becomes apparent why it invites close inspection.

Willem de Kooning’s “Mailbox.”

This is a painting that smiles back at us. The artist has embedded numerous grins into the image, including toothy ones, open-mouthed ones, and Cheshire ones that hover in the midst of blank fields of color. Once these smiles have been located, the arcs of black paint in their vicinity take on the property of chins. They’re right there on the same plane as the viewer’s own face.

Should we need more indications about the intended mood and scope of this hallucination, there are other figures tucked into this amalgamation of strokes and swirls, too, and they’re all rather ordinary: a table, a door, a wagging tongue, an overturned banana, the outline of a passerby and, dangling over the edge of an inner frame, a representation of a pencil making a mark.

To a person, the many human figures in “Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945-50” share that approachability. One is a leering clown mask with a sausage-like nose and a car’s wheel for an ear. Another, a plump gingerbread cookie cut-out in black, out walking through paint splatter toward a gateway at the bottom of a frame. They’re strange, but they contain no hint of menace. They possess that awkward friendliness that animates all of de Kooning’s mature canvases.

It’s a weird place we’re in, but it’s a habitable one. We can step right in without fretting about it too much.

Willem de Kooning’s “Black Friday.”

Even “Black Friday,” the chilliest painting in the show, never feels overwhelming. Instead, de Kooning orients the viewer instantly by placing a trio of buildings in the distance and an amalgam of drooping shapes that roughly resemble a body in the foreground. Generous as he is, he always makes sure we know that we’re on the ground. Unlike other abstract artists, he rarely leaves us floating in space.

He is even willing to spell it out for us from time to time. “Zot,” one of the wildest paintings in this show, is dominated by de Kooning’s message: “ART,” written in buckled black letters in paint on the lower left quadrant of the canvas. Cheeky metacommentary is not usually associated with abstract expressionism, but there it is, on a lively canvas painted by the movement’s leading light.

It is a reminder of the sense of humor and play that animates — and elevates — much of de Kooning’s work. If he promises us a “Town Square” (see at top of this post), he may blow its shapes toward the corners of the frame and create a whirlpool of white paint strokes at the center of the canvas that seems to tug everything at the periphery into the center, and gleefully reinvent sightlines according to a personal logic. But he will also still, somehow, evoke the essence of the familiar thing he is telling us it is.

Perhaps that is why de Kooning plays as well for us now as it did at mid-century. Then, as now, events were accelerating. The known world was about to be turned upside down. Ours may, too. We know that our environment is changing in ways that we can scarcely understand. Exhale, find your footing, and realize that dark pond in the woods is still there. So is the town square. So, maybe, is your smile.

The Princeton University Art Museum will present “Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945-50″ through July 26. Visit artmuseum.princeton.edu.

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