Willem de Kooning’s ‘Woman-Ochre’, oil on canvas, 1955 in the conservation studio at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles. The painting is held in the collection of the University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson but was cut out of its frame and stolen in 1985 and later rediscovered in an antique store in New Mexico thirty-two years later in 2017. The work will go on show at the Getty Institute in June 2022 as part of an exhibition exploring the restoration of the painting.
Photograph by Philip Cheung for the New York Times
Willem de Kooning’s ‘Woman-Ochre’, oil on canvas, 1955 in the conservation studio at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles. The painting is held in the collection of the University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson but was cut out of its frame and stolen in 1985 and later rediscovered in an antique store in New Mexico thirty-two years later in 2017. The work will go on show at the Getty Institute in June 2022 as part of an exhibition exploring the restoration of the painting.
Photograph by Philip Cheung for the New York Times
“What you see is what you see," Frank Stella once said of his paintings, meaning they referred to nothing outside of themselves and represented nothing beyond pigment and canvas. Yet many of Stella’s paintings were named after places, local and far afield—Firuzabadand Hampton Roads, Gran CairoandTelluride. This seeming contradiction is not unique to Stella—many artists of the post-war period who worked in an exclusively abstract mode, allude to locations, places, or geographies in the titles of their works. These range from geographically-specific sites (Mahoning,Villa Borghese), to more generic typologies of place (Basque Beach) and topographical features (Cataract, Mountains and Sea). These works are non-figural, and as such, they do not accord with the art historical genre “landscape,” at least not in the traditional sense.
Are these evocations of place, in fact, equivocations—a reluctance to commit to absolute abstraction, or do titles like Basque Beach amount to a personal association imposed on an painted surface that has no necessary relationship to an actual or conceptual place? To put it more crudely, is there a where there?
While they are clearly not engaged in empirical description or mapping, certain abstract paintings seem to follow the contours of places alluded to in titles or be guided in their formal choices by qualities observed at those places. For example, the high-key palette, overall bright tonality, and wave-like forms of Helen Frankenthaler’s Basque Beach would seem to permit of a quasi-figurative reading of the work. Speaking about her breakthrough work, Mountains and Sea (1952) Frankenthaler parsed the picture’s representational and abstract qualities:
I painted Mountains and Sea after seeing the cliffs of Nova Scotia. It’s a hilly landscape with wild surf rolling against the rocks. Though it was painted in a windowless loft, the memory of the landscape is in the painting, but it has also equal amounts of Cubism, Pollock, Kandinsky, Gorky.
Elsewhere she referred to her paintings as “abstract climates.”
DeKooning described the large paintings he made in the late 1950s bearing place names like Merritt ParkwayandParc Rosenberg as “emotions:”
The pictures (I have) done since the ‘Women’, they’re emotions, most of them. Most of them are landscapes and highways and sensations of that, outside the city – with the feeling of going to the city or coming from it.
For both Frankenthaler and DeKooning, abstraction may mean non-representational, but it doesn’t mean evacuated of memory. The registration of memory, like the gestural brushstroke, is a relic of the artist’s interaction with the canvas, and not a form of “meaning” imposed from without.
In 1965, both Helen Lundeberg and Roy Lichtenstein painted pictures that they referred to as landscapes, but which bordered on abstraction. By calling her radically-simplified , yet figurative picture Landscape, Lundeberg uses the term to suggest an elemental distillation or essence of place. Lichtenstein’s picture is predictably trickier; an image of the horizon executed in benday dots and cropped in such a way that it verges on Rothko-like abstraction, it clearly invokes “landscape” as a meta-category, (like his contemporary images of ruins and brushstrokes) from an ironic distance.
If traditional landscape painting was in some meaningful sense involved with a descriptive or empirical mapping of place, then to what extent can pictures of maps be considered abstract landscapes? Jasper Johns’ recreation of a map retains the form of the visual artefact on which it is based and the stenciled labels are correctly applied, but a cloud of abstract-expressionist brushwork undermines the purpose of the original by reducing it to a merely optical experience. Ed Ruscha proposes a similar conundrum with less Wittgenstein und Drang when he offers us two street names and no other points of reference as either a “view” of L.A. or a detail of a map.
In the late 1970s, Paul first met Willem de Kooning, still a sprightly man in his mid 70s. The connection goes back years, as Linda McCartney’s father, Lee Eastman, was de Kooning’s long-standing lawyer and close family friend, often bringing in special visitors, often including Linda and Paul, to see the ageing artist. And it was visiting his studio one day, to watch him mix colours and paint, that got McCartney hooked on de Kooning’s process itself. Unlike music there were no rules in abstract painting, so it must have felt liberating for Paul: perhaps, with its luscious colours and strident brush strokes, McCartney’s abstract works, such as ‘Key of F’ and 'Robot and Star’ [photos #7 and #8, respectively] carry a little of Willem de Kooning on to this day.
PAUL:“I was lucky enough to know Willem de Kooning because Linda’s father, Lee Eastman Snr., was his lawyer. We would visit his studio in Springs, Long Island and admire his works in progress. I once asked him what one of his abstract pictures was and he said he didn’t know and that it was open to my interpretation. I thought it looked like a purple mountain, he thought it looked like a couch! The point was that his painting was more to do with composition, colour and style rather than anything of significant meaning. Once he’d said this it was a great inspiration to me to start painting, where as in the past I would have been too embarrassed to even buy a canvas and paints. Friends of mine had looked at de Kooning’s paintings and said, 'I could do that,’ but in fact this is far from true and I consider him to be one of the greatest abstract painters ever.”
