\u201cWoman I\u201d (1950-52),<\/a> a seminal work that is on loan from the Museum of Modern Art for the Art Institute show.<\/p>\nDe Kooning drew constantly. The critic Peter Schjeldahl once called the artist \u201ca hand with a man attached.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Kevin Salatino, the lead curator of \u201cWillem de Kooning Drawing,\u201d put it: \u201cDrawing is fundamental to everything he did.\u201d He estimated that there are 2,000 to 3,000 extant drawings by de Kooning, and that many more were lost along the way.<\/p>\n
Salatino, the chair of the prints and drawings department at the Art Institute, talked in a phone interview about the highlights of the show and de Kooning\u2019s devotion to draftsmanship, in a conversation that has been edited and condensed.<\/p>\n
Why does it seem like drawings can get less attention from museum audiences?<\/p>\n
They\u2019re sometimes thought of as preparatory to painting, rather than works in themselves. People don\u2019t necessarily recognize that drawings can be finished works of art. If you\u2019re doing a full retrospective and it\u2019s paintings dominant, then the drawings are going to get short shrift. This is a show where the drawings are dominant and the paintings are subservient. We only have 11 paintings.<\/p>\n
Some of the drawings in this show look like paintings, and there are hybrids that blur the traditional medium categories.<\/p>\n
I would be lying if I didn\u2019t say we also struggled with that. You\u2019ll notice that the title of the show is \u201cWillem de Kooning Drawing\u201d \u2014 singular drawing, not plural. It\u2019s meant to indicate that we\u2019re talking about drawing as both fact and act, as both noun and verb.<\/p>\n
De Kooning was famously on record as saying he didn\u2019t really understand the difference between drawing and painting. There is a kind of graphic sensibility that runs through much of the work, and we tried to trace that.<\/p>\n
So he didn\u2019t do preparatory drawing with a specific painting composition in mind, as many artists do?<\/p>\n
No, he made drawings that would lead to paintings, I would say. He often incorporated one into the other. In some of the hybrids, he was drawing in the painting. Some have a tremendous amount of actual graphite and charcoal \u2014 he was working into the paint with the charcoal, and he just left it there.<\/p>\n
Why is this a show for the Art Institute in particular?<\/p>\n
We have a long history of collecting great drawings. In fact, our first de Kooning drawing is a masterpiece, \u201cTwo Women\u2019s Torsos\u201d (1952), which was bought in 1955.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s special about that one?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s from the time around the painting \u201cWoman I,\u201d and it was done in the summer of 1952 when he was in the Hamptons, staying with Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend. He created a makeshift studio on the back porch, and he made a whole bunch of pastels that summer. You see two bathers standing in a kind of landscape. You can puzzle out certain things happening, but it\u2019s the way he utilizes space that\u2019s so fascinating.<\/p>\n
And pastels can be tricky.<\/p>\n
You can\u2019t blend pastels because they turn muddy and gray. You have to be very careful with how you apply them. And he used very cheap pastels. He didn\u2019t go for the fancy French ones, and yet he created the most extraordinary color juxtapositions. You never question the actual fleshiness of those flesh tones, even when they\u2019re lilac or yellow.<\/p>\n
How did he get to this level of draftsmanship?<\/p>\n
I have always said that de Kooning was the last old master. He was trained in that tradition. He went to the Rotterdam Academy at the beginning of the 20th century, which was still using the techniques and practices of earlier centuries. And what do you start with? You start with drawing.<\/p>\n
If you look at his first extant drawing, which he gave to the Met, \u201cDish with Jugs\u201d (ca. 1919-21), it is a masterpiece in our show. When you see it reproduced, it looks like a black-and-white photograph.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been calculated that it took him something like 600 hours of work, making that drawing over a very long period of time in short spurts, because he went to school only at night. He had to work during the day.<\/p>\n
What was he doing?<\/p>\n
He was working for a design company from the age of 13 or 14, which is part of what distinguishes him from almost every other major artist of the 20th century. He knew all the tricks of sign painting and faux painting. He could build furniture. He knew how to wallpaper. He learned all of those tricks.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s something that will surprise even frequent museum goers?<\/p>\n
In the 1960s, he started to draw with his eyes closed. There was a tradition for that \u2014 Surrealism had a lot of that. There\u2019s just something about the embodiment of his line, because he was not looking, he was just moving his hand with a tool in it. There\u2019s a group of them from 1966 that he published in book form. We have all 24 of them.<\/p>\n
That seems extraordinary \u2014 how did it work?<\/p>\n
He literally closed his eyes, but he put his finger in the middle of the page so he could at least control where he was on the sheet. He drew from the middle out. He was willing to take a chance with that, because people already recognized him as a truly great draftsman. He was always pushing himself to do something that would force him into a new state of creativity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Summer is the time for blockbuster museum exhibitions, and frequently those popular, big ticket shows focus on painting.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":424598,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1228,54046,442,498,499,500,217765,217763,501,156,61092,8793,111,139,69,217762,217764],"class_list":["post-424597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-art","tag-art-institute-of-chicago","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-chicago-ill","tag-de-kooning","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-kevin","tag-museums","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-salatino","tag-willem"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=424597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424597\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/424598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=424597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=424597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=424597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}