… he believed that the vague outlines of a life derived from immersion in and responses to the flux of perception.
… ‘ … I have no pre-established aesthetic basis on which to make a choice.’
This is from Between Sense and De Kooning by Richard Shiff (2011):
… The object of de Kooning’s motivating experience need not be a thing occupying the immediate external environment. It could be something envisioned in memory or even visualized as forms emerging and accumulating on the canvas. The object of experience could become the process representing it, with the subject emerging along with its representation, interdependently. ‘I’m not interested in “abstracting” or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line or color,’ de Kooning said around 1950. ‘I paint this way because I can keep putting more and more things in — drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space.’ If we take him at his word, he was adding colours, lines, shapes, whatever, not as a slew of superfluities to a compositional concept already abstracted … , but as the means of evoking a full range of observations and feeling.
… In 1962, new writing by Greenberg compounded the misgivings and the slights [of his earlier writings] of the 1950s. He attacked de Kooning’s staunch ally Rosenberg for conceiving of abstract expressionism as action painting in which ‘everything lay in the doing, nothing in the making.’ Here, ‘doing’ signalled Rosenberg’s existentialist orientation, whereas ‘making’ signalled Greenberg’s pragmatism, his interest in the ultimate strength of the finished product.
… If a writer for Time quoted de Kooning correctly in 1965 — ‘Art is the thing you cannot make’ — this, too, might have been a statement against Greenberg (the maker), in favour of Rosenberg (the actor). ‘You are supposed to feel it,’ de Kooning said. Just do it: more process than product. When he suggested that each of Cézanne’s strokes had ‘its own point of view,’ he was giving the stroke a license to act. With a stroke, as de Kooning said, Cézanne came ‘face to face with his “little sensation.”‘
… He regarded multiple points of view as entirely proper and desirable; his distinctive marks translated into a multiplicity of effects and feelings. This was a Cézannean brand of multiplicity, not the cubist variety — the transience of feeling, not a theory of transience. Its operation required no transcendent principles of form, space or perspective, not even the principle of a stable self. ‘I can change,’ de Kooning always said; and ‘I’m still working out of doubt.’
Untitled V, 1985… Merleau-Ponty’s statement [in his essay 'Cézanne's Doubt'] began: ‘He needed one hundred working sessions for a still life, one hundred and fifty sittings for a portrait. What we call his work was, for him, only an essay, an approach to painting.’
… Merleau-Ponty’s meditation on Cézanne suffers from anachronism. Interpreting the painter and the painter’s doubt, he was actually approaching the position of de Kooning, his true contemporary. Unaware of de Kooning but in some respects much like him, Merleau-Ponty believed that finality and certitude were false desires that blunted the sensation of life. He defined the successful picture as one that ‘makes movement [of life] visible by its internal discordance.’ The description fits the instability in representational paintings by either Cézanne or de Kooning. As a phenomenologist and an existentialist, Merleau-Ponty wished to counter interpretations that derived the meaning of a work from a given ideology, an artist’s programmed psychological state, or even some inner essence; he believed that the vague outlines of a life derived from immersion in and responses to the flux of perception.
A parallel to de Kooning’s ‘I can change overnight’ exists in Picasso, in Françoise Gilot’s remarkable reconstruction of his thinking. Picasso was explaining how he differed from Cézanne: ‘I don’t choose anything [such as a special motif]; I take what comes.’ To paraphrase Picasso’s project, whatever it is, limits neither his initial choices nor his actions. He continues:
My trees aren’t made up of structures I have chosen but structures which the chance of my own dynamism imposes on me. Cézanne meant that in looking at nature, to receive the sensation of an object outside himself, he sought what corresponded to a certain aesthetic demand that pre-existed in him . . . I have no pre-established aesthetic basis on which to make a choice.’
My most recent previous post from Shiff’s book is here.
-Julie
