Willem De Kooning: Drawing Seeing/Seeing Drawing

Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) regularly created series of drawings, sometimes continuing them intermittently over a decade. Despite de Koonings renown as a painter and draftsman, there have been no publications to look at selected groups of his drawings in depth. This book, and the traveling exhibition organized by The Drawing Center, New York, presents four of his drawing series, affording a closer view of de Koonings working process and his constant reinvention of mark-making.

The earliest series to be included, Folded Shirt on Laundry Paper, 1958, is figured by a calligraphic spareness and openness that lays bare a panoply of mark-making possibilities with brush and ink. The second series are twenty-four drawings from 1966 which the artist created with eyes closed. These works make clear just how totally interdependent de Koonings memory and drawing hand were. But for their documentation, they are indistinguishable from his drawings made with eyes open. Several of the drawings are of the Crucifixion, and this subject, unique for de Kooning, comprises the third group of drawings executed in the mid- and late-1960s. These drawings take fullest advantage of charcoals lush flexibility. The fourth group, almost never seen, is comprised of tracings made on large sheets of vellum of painting configurations that might be employed in subsequent works. Done from the late-1960s through the 1970s, these double-sided drawings are made startlingly complete by de Koonings subsequent improvisations added to them.

Each series will be discussed in relation to the artists contemporaneous painting and will explicate his constantly changing but interrelated means. No other artist of his generation produced drawings so regularly and so superbly. Drawing is the crucible of de Koonings art.