I’d like to write like ___… (fill in the blank)
Still Life with De Kooning...
Back in the 80s, when I lived in New York City, my sister and I went to see a De Kooning show at the Whitney Museum of Art. We played a game: Stood back from each canvas and guessed its title, delighting ourselves when we came close—when we saw what we were supposed to see—though no word or phrase of ours was as pungent or evocative as any of De Kooning’s: Here’s a sampling (in no particular order) from the vast retrospective on the sixth floor of Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art through mid-January, 2012: The Cow Jumps Over the Moon; Landing in Boston; Door to the River; The Cat’s Meow; Conversation; Queen of Hearts; Excavation; Whose Name was Writ in Water… And my especial favorite?–title, I mean?–Self Portrait with Imaginary Brother: Talk about mixed genre; talk about emotionally loaded. And to think about: how can an artist—painter, musician, poet—focus the imagination of his audience with a title? Should a work of art speak for itself? Should we go ahead and interpret as we please? (Can we help it?) Or ought we to consider the creator’s intention? See, once we know the title of that drawing, and as we consider those two boys side by side—how not to be intrigued by the inner life of at least one of them?
Self Portrait with Imaginary Brother, completed in 1938, comes early in the current exhibition, which covers “seven eras”; De Kooning only stopped working a few years before his death at age 93. But though it wasn’t difficult to choose my favorite title, I’d be hard-pressed to pick a favorite decade—I couldn’t, in fact. For if they are wonderful one by one—each painting and each period—taken together, as evidence of a life in art, the effect is extraordinary.
But you can read any number of experts on De Kooning–including Holland Cotter, who wrote about this particular show when it opened last September: “Unfurling a Life of Creative Exuberance” reads the headline, which (speaking of the power of titles), by way of entry to his smart review, was just one more reason I couldn’t wait to get to MoMA when I was in New York a few weeks ago.
According to Taylor, “…De Kooning…wanted to open everything up, to bring—to squeeze—everything into art: high, low; old, new; savagery, grace… And so he did, in a laborious, pieced-together, piled-up, revision-intensive way…”
The critic then explains the artist’s process: “Typically he would start with a drawing, add paint, draw on top of the paint, scrape the surface down, draw more images traced and transferred from elsewhere, add paint to them, and on and on.”
Sound familiar? Sound like writing and revising? (and revising, and revising again) I thought so. I hoped so. And I couldn’t wait to see for myself.
Then, not long after I’d made reservations online, a status update on Facebook caught my eye: “I want to write the way De Kooning painted,” wrote Susan Cheever. At least that’s what I thought she’d written–that’s what I remembered when I checked with her after seeing the show, to ask about quoting her post. Susan referred me to an essay she’d published at The Fix, which was enough to send me back to Facebook to find her post all over again. Turned out I’d been hasty—I’d heard what I wanted to hear. Susan’s actual status? “I want to write the way De Kooning painted in 1981–those last precious years.” And in her good essay, she asserts that De Kooning’s best work was created after he got sober at age 74. “Can only a fellow ex-alcoholic get it?” she asks.
Maybe so. But how to reconcile Cheever and Cotter? Cheever and me? Not that Cotter doesn’t love the later paintings (and I do, too), but not more than the others; and while Cheever characterizes the early work as “frantic and uncontrolled,” he tells us just the opposite: the artist, he says, “was a deliberator,” and, “Every painting was a controlled experiment.”
On top of which, in the exhibition itself, one of De Kooning’s students is quoted as saying that his teacher worked relentlessly, month after month after month on a single piece, to achieve the feeling that the paint had been “blown” onto the canvas. So, whether or not the artist was a drunk, here’s my take: I’d like to write like De Kooning painted; with that kind of focus, absorption, commitment, and passion, year after year, decade after decade; I’d like to accumulate a body of work that honestly reflects who I am and who I’m becoming; I’d hope to acquire experience, insight, and fluency that informs my craft and content; and I’d like to think my perspective–as it changes and deepens–will continue to inform and transform me and my sentences.
De Kooning inspires me—just me—not because he sobered up, but rather because he was never content to repeat himself; and, as far as I can tell, he never got stuck. Or if he did, I guess he stuck with it until he wasn’t stuck anymore. Besides which, those earlier paintings are gorgeous in my view, full of movement and color and humor and joy and pathos and mystery; and I’d like to write like that, yeah.
So: All kinds of questions raised here, by three—only three!—responses to art: Is it true that we are what we do? How much must we know about the artist to understand and appreciate his work? Can the audience, reader or viewer or listener, help but project and endow? Is there any such thing as objectivity on either side of the equation? And does it matter what moves us, so long as we are moved?
Chime in and tell me what you think…
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| Tags: Holland Cotter, MoMA, Susan Cheever, The Fix, The New York Times, The Whitney Museum, Willem De Kooning |
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life.
–William Stafford
and ever since reading that, I have wondered if what I have done IS my life, because, of course, I fervently hope not, and at the same time hope so. You ask the question I haven’t been able to answer. Are we what we do? Oh dear . . . the TV shows I’ve watched, the times I’ve spent scratching off the scratch-off Bingo cards, the . . . well, you get it. So I believe that we are all MORE than we have done, because we are also what we have thought, even when no one else knows what we are thinking, even when we don’t get around to painting it or writing it or doing anything with it. It’s part of what makes the next work, and the next. Isn’t it? As for objectivity–my definition is that I am being objective and everyone else is subjective, or else it’s that my subjectivity is objective, one or the other. Whatever keeps you sure enough of your opinion to dare having one.
My objective opinion: You’re exactly right–we’re greater (more complicated anyway) than the sum of our parts, or something like that… And the Stafford–oh my, yes–thank you for that too…
Dinah,
Your opening gambit– the question of the TITLE–and your game with titles– was enough to get me thinking, deeply, about the relationship of the self to the work. Gerard Manley Hopkins: “what I do is me– for that I came.” Back to titles: I have a theatre background, mainly East Village, off-off Broadway, and the title bears ALOT of pressure– for finding an audience for the text, the production itself! This is of course different from the relationship a painter has with naming… I remember once at Yaddo (or MacDowell?) there was a title-challenged painter and he’d invite poets into his studio to help him cook up titles.
Performance artist and playwright Holly Hughes, when asked about her titling-process, said “I work backwards from the press release”–
thanks for pointing me to the Cheever essay as well. One more thing– have you seen NOW DIG THIS at the Hammer, it is up right now, I walked through a few weeks ago and have been back twice….
Brighde, so interesting about titles–how they will and will not reveal themselves… When they are useful and when they are essential and when they are some kind of excuse or apology having to do with an idea about the work that’s only an idea… But so true that naming a painting or piece of music is very different from coming up with a title for a play or a book…I know, conventional as I am, I am often looking for a story–a narrative–hence the title game: What’s this picture about? But artists don’t necessarily think that way… And though I’m with whoever it was who said that everything worthwhile is personal (Nabokov?), according to Holland Cotter, “De Kooning said many times that his art incorporated but was not about personal expression.” And yet his titles–they are so idiosyncratic–so expressive of a singular imagination and sensibility. Did he mean to tease the likes of me? Maybe so… Thanks for reading–and for sending me to NOW DIG THIS–I’ll go this weekend–
Dinah, regarding music, I think a large part of what attracts me to music is narrative, and not necessarily in pieces that are built around story like an opera or musical. I think most pieces of classical music do have a narrative or at least play with the idea of narrative structure. The titles informs those narratives all the more important since music communicates without telling. I think a great many people would be less willing to sit through Penderecki’s difficult string orchestra piece 8’37″ than the same piece renamed “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima.”
Sorry for the bad grammar…
“The titles inform those narratives all the more since music communicates without telling.”
Hi Howard. I agree completely… And I’m wondering about the difficulty factor–how much that has to do with weight and import of titling a piece. Generous of the creator to guide us with a word or a phrase… And then there’s a piece like Schumann’s Piano Concerto in Am, right? It’s never occurred to me that he was withholding information–and yet I’m free to make my own associations… Another kind of generosity on the composer’s part… The question might be, does he (did he) anticipate my free-associating? Does he care, once he’s realized his own vision, how or if I come up with my own interpretation? Which I’d be less likely to do with a title, I guess… Thanks for reading.
Great essay! I really enjoyed it a lot. Above average and superior photo as well!
one thing I was curious about was whether or not the very late paintings done when he was consumed by Alzheimer’s were titled….I would always have to wonder if they were, did he title them? Many of my paintings have been titled by someone else (guess who, yes Amy) I usually just sit in front of a finished painting waiting for a title to come into my head…..I wish I didn’t have to do it at all like most painters I know. Odd to think that painters would have to title so many more things than writers….but one book a year is a lot for a writer, not so for a painter…but then again the title of a book is so much more important to the book than the title of a painting. I never take museum recorded tours because I don’t want someone putting info into my head about paintings I want to see for the first time. Doing the recorded tour is a totally separate event in my opinion. I don’t look at titles until I have looked at the painting because I don’t want that info in my head either. To paraphrase my favorite painter Balthus: this in regards to what they asked him he would like said about him at the opening of his retrospective in NYC at the Met (which I don’t believe he attended) Balthus is a painter of whom very little is known….now let us go look at the paintings! Perfect!
Hi Nick–I thought about you as I wrote this post–how you’d told me when I blogged about Rooms with a View at the Met back in June that you don’t think in terms of narrative–you simply paint what you see, as with “A View to the Foyer” (http://www.nickpatten.com/ViewtotheFoyer.htm). But hey, whatever the title, your work–so meticulously observed–triggers my impulse to narrative… And so it is for the person who titles at least some of your paintings, right? As with “So Quiet Now” (http://www.nickpatten.com/SoQuietNow.htm), which implies it was noisy days or weeks or moments ago. Anyway, titles aside, I think I’m with you and Balthus, I’d almost rather not know very much about the creator, since, when we know stuff, we’re bound to color and shade–and judge!–even more than we already would… See, I don’t want to think about De Kooning’s paintings as the work of an addict–I see them rather as a celebration of the gorgeous messiness of life… But Susan Cheever comes to the work from a different point of view–objective, subjective–and therefore comes to a different conclusion… This happens with writers and actors, too, right? We think we know them–we fall in love with them on stage or on the page: but how much do we have to know about any artist to appreciate his work for what it is? Can we take his word for it–judge according to his title? Depends on the artist, I guess. As for your question about the late paintings: Some of them were titled and some of them weren’t… Thanks so much for reading and writing.
lots of ruckus about ‘titles’…and it is interesting. reading all the comments here I was thinking how much suggestibility has to do with it, how extraordinarily flexible & inventive our narative capacities are, so that if you point to an swirl of clouds overhead and say ‘dog’–I will find a way to see a dog there…it could be that what we do by way of responsive projection is as creative as what the ‘artist’ did with far greater labor. our willingness to see and interpret argues for the power of the unconscious, and maybe one of the greatest services art provides is not feeding us messages or contents per se, but in connecting us to that reservoir, the connection itself being the point. a funny version of this business of looking at a painting by conjuring with its title is reading a novel (those penguin paperbacks geoff dyer wrote about recently) and having the prolonged experience of that somehow colored by the art. i guess the point is that we are genre-porous in terms of our suggestibility–that sensory associations of all kinds are irresistible and inevitable–and they bind the work (whatever it is) to our hyper-complex personal experience. good post!
I saw that Geoff Dyer piece, yeah… Genre-porous–that’s interesting–not unrelated to synesthesia, right? The thing about the arts–writing, painting, composing–is that we appear to be able to do only one thing at a time, even when it’s so obviously informed by the others, for both the author and his/her audience… The exception might be performance–musical and theatrical–which might integrate a fuller vision, although the creator/composer has to be up for collaboration, that’s the thing… But as to one experience inflecting or connecting us to another, don’t we seem to come round and round again to idea of “seeing”–for so many of us the image triggers a story, or the story triggers an image, do I have that right? Thanks for reading and writing…
Dinah
Thank you for writing and sharing this essay. So much to ponder – for starters, the questions you pose at the end of the first paragraph regarding a title’s impact upon a work of art. Applied to written word, would we read Of Mice and Men the same way if it were simply called Lennie and George? I refer to that particular novel because we used to read it in 8th grade Literature class; occasionally, I asked my students to create titles for individual chapters. While the results varied greatly (a microcosm of the junior high school experience, perhaps), I’d like to think the exercise itself forced us to consider titles from a part vs. whole perspective.
I’m not familiar with the work of Holly Hughes, but I love her quote (provided by Brighde) about working “backwards from the press release.” So many of my non-writing friends assume that the creative process begins with a title … when so often the opposite is true. “Hate” is an awfully strong word, but how many creative writing students have you met who claim to hate writing titles? More than a few, I would guess. What is it that makes title writing such a daunting task? Are we worried that an ill-fitting title will somehow detract from the overall quality of the work? Are we intimidated by the title’s prominent, beginning-of-the-piece location? (“You never get a second chance to make a first impression.”) Are we simply exhausted by the time we get done brainstorming, drafting, and revising, revising, revising?
Similarly fascinating is the notion of art transcending medium-based lines – am I nuts, or does this mirror the MPW multi-genre philosophy, simply on a larger scale? I’m intrigued by the way poets talk about visual art (see: Aram Saroyan), the way a musical score contributes to a theatrical performance, the number of popular novelists who aspire to play in rock and roll bands; I don’t know why, but this type of artistic interconnectedness feels comforting to me. And “interconnected” is as good a word as any to describe the expertly braided essay you’ve written – thanks again for sharing it with us!
Hi Rob. Me, too, much comforted by all these connections and influences… And I like your exercise so much–titling chapters after the fact (sort of like stepping back from those paintings, no?)–not just a good way to focus your students, but maybe a way to focus ourselves in a big, unwieldy project? If and when the pieces (chapters) have become slightly unmanageable? And you’re right: lots of writers have trouble coming up with titles (I’m one)… On the other hand, there are those who want to title their projects before they know what they’re writing about–the idea of the BOOK takes over… Often as not it turns out to be only an idea, though… Anyway–how nice to hear from you. And thanks for jumping in here…
Dinah
Speaking of stepping back, I often use the “reverse outline” strategy I learned in your MPW Personal Essay class — both with my undergraduate students and my own writing. What an effective revision technique it’s turned out to be.
By the way, I love this language from your original post: ” … as far as I can tell, he [De Kooning] never got stuck. Or if he did, I guess he stuck with it until he wasn’t stuck anymore.” What a clever way to describe the discipline it takes to be an artist — of any kind.
Thank you, Rob… (About degree of stuck and how to unstick–I guess that one falls under note to self, aiaiaiaai…….)