In this week’s Chicago Reader (no link, boo hiss), Erin Hogan has a selling review of Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan’s De Kooning: An American Master. She had a great time reading the book, though she notes that Stevens and Swan had some help from the painter in making it so readable: “De Kooning’s life story is a biographer’s dream, full of tragedy, triumph, and salacious, page-turning detail.”
But I’m more interested in the built-in limitation she points to that afflicts many artists’ biographers:
Writers apparently love to write about writing; they produce volumes about the creative process in general and their practice in particular, and there are countless books devoted to the topic of writers on their craft….Painters, however, rarely talk about their process.
After de Kooning finished the magnificent Excavation (now housed at the Art Institute), it took him three years to complete another painting. That’s not so surprising–all artists fall fallow or need time, after a major creative outburst, to recharge. What is surprising about de Kooning’s three-year disapppearance is that he was working the whole time, with the same obsessive intensity as ever. And he was working, essentially, on one painting: Woman I, the first of the infamous “Woman” series.
For de Kooning, Woman I was an endless nightmare. He grew so angry with the work that, according to Stevens and Swan, at one point he “ripped [it] off the frame and left it in the hallway by his door, with a stack of old cardboard and odds and ends of wood.” But while that might explain what happened to the physical object, bitterly rejected there at the end of the hall, we are no closer to understanding what would compel de Kooning to spend three years on one painting or why he would decide it was a hopeless failure….
Stevens and Swan heroically attempt to describe the creation of Woman I, but those three years remain elusive, as do much of the inner workings of de Kooning’s mind. All of the contextual detail, description, lyrical interpretations, lectures, articles, and chronicles of conversations marshaled by the authors–none of it quite gets to the core. The fortress of fact protects the empty throne.
I haven’t read enough artists’ biographies to have realized this about them, but Hogan’s observation especially interested me since I’m now about 80 pages into Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, a novel that is narrated by a painter and that has me completely captivated. Half the book’s spell over me is in its persuasive effort to represent the artist’s eye. The narrator, Gulley Jimson, looks at the world–the curve of a woman’s back, a coffee spill on a tablecloth–and reflexively sees possibilities for his painting. He sees so much this way–and misses so much. I’ve read novels about artists before, but never any that made this serious an attempt to minutely portray how a painter looks at the world, what he sees, and what he does with it. This is, I think, just what Hogan finds herself missing in art biographies, and it does seem more suited to the novelist’s art than that of the biographer, who is indeed limited to “the fortress of fact.”
More on the novel when I finish it someday. In the meantime, if you’re in Chicago, pick up a free Reader and check out the rest of Hogan’s review. (If you’re not, keep an eye on this guy.)