Willem deKooning Drawing at AIC is an exhaustive study of works on paper, beginning with a year-long school assignment in the artist's native Rotterdam.
There is also a suite of illustrations done to earn some keep
and beautiful carbon and graphite pencil drawings from 1937.
A WWII drawing establishing the rhythmic space in work to come.
1942, Woman's Head, Graphite pencil on wove paper, along the lines of his fastidious sketch of Elaine.
He starts to build a palette and vocabulary, tracing or projecting images that he then interchanges, and draws into with the other images and edges.
We are between 1942 and 1947 in these works.
1948 Women studies, recalling Picasso's Demoiselles, portending a primary motif. He is importing Gorky's smokiness, until the pencil takes him to the sword brush in the series below. We move into the 1950s with these.
1948-51, enamel on Bruning paper: commercial materials from sign painting days.
Layered, striated space.
1958 or so--pastel and charcoal--very interesting to see this and the next few opposite the enamel and sword brush drawings, all leading up to the women.
Two Women on a Wharf, a collage/print/drawings in which torsos double as heads below tinier heads, 1948
Monumental Woman, 1953, charcoal and fixative on Strathmore Seconds paper, inspired by the monuments he witnessed in Washington, DC during a retrospective of his work.
College and drawing, importing the mouth from a magazine ad. Fleshy space.
Throughout the show several paintings anchor the drawings, as capstones for process.
Two Women with Still LIfe, 1952, pastel, charcoal, and fixative on paper, in which the women meld into the landscape.
The theme continues, opening the forms, the line, and speeding the hand.
A flayed, splayed body: what I imagine how he imagines sex.
Note to self.
A few jittery drawings though in truth for me after the Women room the show starts to flatten, until
This painting, which summarizes intermeshing flesh so readily, the chunky, physical space of bodies,
and this final painting, reducing them to movement through line.
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