Willem de Kooning and Italy: paintings, sculptures and drawings on display in Venice

During the Biennale, in Venice, the opportunities for encounters with art multiply. The large spaces dedicated to temporary exhibitions of Accademia Galleries they welcome 75 works including drawings, paintings and sculptures by Willem de Kooningis already in the first room, in front of the large canvases on display, one feels enveloped in the embrace of color in its happiest, warmest and most vigorous expression.

There retrospective, curated by Gary Garrels and Mario Codognato, delves into the influence that Italian art and culture have had on the evolution of his research and, thus, the Venetian museum, with the largest collection of Venetian painting existing in the world and a journey that ranges from fourteenth century to eighteenth century painting, dialogues with one of the main artists of the twentieth century.

Created in collaboration with The Willem de Kooning Foundation, which manages the heritage and promotes the valorization of the artist’s life and work, the exhibition project Willem de Kooning and Italy (until September 15th) traces the experience of the artist’s Italian stays Dutch, naturalized American (1904, Rotterdam – 1997, East Hampton), investigating for the first time the impact, and therefore the results, in the creation of his works, between abstraction and figuration.

We start from the 1950s, with an exploration of the works (the paintings Abstract Parkway) made before the 1959 trip, made at the height of success – on the occasion of the solo show at the Sidney Janis Gallery he sold all the works on the opening day -, we pass through the Sixties and Seventies, the period in which the second stay takes place Italian, to finally arrive at the production of the Eighties. “De Kooning is one of the great American innovators” and, according to Amy Schichtel, executive director of the foundation dedicated to him, “his story as an experimenter continues to be a vital inspiration for many contemporary artists, as well as for students and young people in general ”.

Two significant experiences, lived ten years apart. Having been fascinated by Italy already on the occasion of a short trip that also took him to Venice – he participated in six editions of the Biennale Arte, the first in 1950 and the last in 1988 -, in 1959 de Kooning arrived in Rome and stayed for four months, from the end of September 1959 to the beginning of January 1960. “New York, which had seemed so grandiose to me, seemed cramped after Rome,” she recalls in an interview. The Roman ones are intense months, during which she frequents Italian artists with whom she establishes relationships of friendship, discussion and collaboration. She paints black and white works on paper and experiments a lot, using all the space, including the floor, materials and techniques. Inspiration accompanies him too once he returns to New York: here, in 1960, he dedicates himself to the creation of large abstract paintings including Door to the River, A Tree in Naples And Villa Borghese.

Without ever resting on the successes obtained (“too easy”, he often repeats), always looking for new ways and referring to the preparation of some paintings, he explains: “I would like to do everything: natural reality and the abstract gesture, my vision of humanity and my thoughts. I don’t want to be interested in a specific problem […] but to all problems.” In the summer of 1969 he is invited to the Festival dei Due Mondi of Spoleto and there, in a small studio, he creates four ink drawings, now exhibited in Venice together with others in close dialogue with the sculptures. The occasion of this trip allows him to return to Rome: a stay that proves to be fundamental in his approach to sculptural practice. In a café in Trastevere he met Herzl Emanuel, a sculptor known in New York, who, in Rome, had taken over a small bronze foundry. Attending the foundry, de Kooning began to experiment by creating thirteen small figures, then cast in bronze. Back in the United States, he continued to work with clay and, between 1972 and 1974, created a new group of sculptures.

“To create his personal lexicon, Willem de Kooning drew on the chorality of stimuli from everyday life, such as light and movement,” explain the curators of the Venetian exhibition. “The impact of each visual experience could offer or generate an idea for creating a new drawing or painting. During his formative trips to Italy, he enriched his language and reworked a new modus operandi through an in-depth study of classical Italian art and the work of his new Italian artist friends.”

“I’m interested in all art, I feel closer to tradition.” Referring to churches of Rome, de Kooning describes the emotion he felt in front of the works they house, paintings that appear to him “right from any angle you choose to look at them”. A sensation that he manages to translate into works permeated with light, created towards the end of his career and born from a constant and passionate comparison with the history of art, explored always with renewed amazement and which in Italy can continually be encountered while admiring Titian and Tintoretto, the Renaissance lesson. And since the beginning, in fact, exalts the talent of the Venetians: “Their brushstrokes, no one could make better brushstrokes”.

Light, but not only: de Kooning pays attention to movement. “The figure is nothing if you don’t twist it like a strange miracle”, he specifies. In a 1969 interview, given to the journalist Charlotte Willard, she talks about when, ten years earlier, she had been able to admire the sculpture on Day by Michelangelo, in the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence: he was fascinated by the “contraction of the body, of which great artists are aware. Everything returns to the center, the figure floats from the center.” The wonder in front of that dynamic suspension: a vision to be elaborated and translated into his art, into sculptures such as Cross-Legged Figures And Floating Figureswith a growing interest in floating bodies, reflected in water or moving in space.

Willem de Kooning, Screams of Children Come from Seagulls (Untitled XX), 1975 oil on canvas 195.6 x 223.5 cm Glenstone Museum Potomac, Maryland © 2024 The Willem de Kooning Foundation, SIAE