Willem de Kooning

and Italy

Mario CodognatoI’d like to ask you, Gary, you know de Kooning’s work very well and you curated an extraordinary exhibition on his late paintings in San Francisco some years ago. But I understand that an exhibition about de Kooning and Italy is something you’d been hoping to do for a long time. Why was that? Why do you think it’s important to put together an exhibition focused on the trips to Italy that he took in 1959 and 1969?

Gary GarrelsI was excited when you called me about this chance to work together—we’ve known each other about twenty years and you’re a curator I’ve admired for many years. I knew it would be wonderful to have someone here in Italy who can dig into the archives and understand the context of de Kooning’s time in Italy, which is so deeply enriching to the project. But to answer your question, I’ve thought about de Kooning and his relationship to Italy for many years. Part of that is because my first trip to Europe was to Italy, I fell in love with Rome and Venice, and I’m still in love with both cities. So I can imagine how de Kooning might have felt. I was very interested that he spent four months here in 1959, then came back again in 1969 and worked in Rome. He initiated making sculpture in Rome in 1969, and if he hadn’t been in Rome I doubt he ever would have made sculpture. I’ve always loved his sculpture, which many people don’t consider a primary part of his work—he’s known more as a painter and draftsman and he had only one period of making sculpture, from 1969 to 1974. And even as sculpture these works are outliers because he worked in bronze, which is not a material typical of a time when artists were working with steel, aluminum, and plastics, for example. But sculpture is a profoundly important part of his work.

MCIt’s been very interesting to do this research because so little attention has been paid to his travels to Italy. He not only had an affinity with Italy, as he always said in his interviews and letters, but he had a lot of Italian friends. He befriended many of the Italian artists of the ’50s who had spent time in New York—like Afro, Toti Scialoja, and Piero Dorazio—and they reciprocated when he came to Rome. So he participated directly in the artists’ life of the Rome of the time, and we have to remember that Rome in the late ’50s was really the place to go, even more than Paris. So many American artists passed through and spent time there. But when de Kooning came to Rome, he didn’t go just as a tourist, even though it was his first travel abroad since he moved to the States as an illegal immigrant in 1926. He really had a relationship with these people in the city and spent most of his time with them—for the few months that he was there, he participated in the artist community. He borrowed Afro’s studio, for example, and made a group of what we think are very important drawings there that we’re going to show in the exhibition. They were made on classic Fabriano paper with black enamels mixed with ground pumice to soften the shine. Some of the sheets are painted on both sides, torn and recomposed in a collage that creates a three-dimensional, perspectival effect. So Gary, I ask you, what importance do these black and white drawings have in terms of the show? What role do they play?

GGThe late ’50s was a period of exceptional change and transformation for de Kooning. In 1959 he had a very successful exhibition, introducing bold abstract paintings completely different from what had preceded them. That show was a great success. He had enough money and decided to come to Italy and spend time there. In Rome he began experiments with the drawings, and those experiments led the way for him to go back to the United States and make new work. They haven’t been widely recognized but I think they’re very important. When he went back to New York, he made just four large-scale paintings in 1960, and we’re bringing together three of those for the first time. I think you’ll see the importance of this transition. I think the opportunity to really look at these drawings made in Rome will show the profound impact they had on the subsequent work.

Then a little later, in the early ’60s, de Kooning started engaging with figurative work again. And we’ll show three of the most significant paintings from that period, which prefigure the sculptures that he would first experiment with in Rome at the end of the decade. We feel the sculpture is essential work for de Kooning—it’s a very important part of this exhibition that has been not so well recognized and has its roots in Rome. Mario, you might talk about the second trip to Rome, and about the importance of those sculptures.

MCLike most things in life, they happened by chance. The second trip came about through an invitation to the Spoleto Festival, which focused primarily on music and the performing arts but included an exhibition program for visual art. De Kooning was offered a room in the house of Gian Carlo Menotti, the composer who founded the festival, and a backstage area to work in. But de Kooning was a very urban person; he really liked to be in cities. He lived in New York for most of his life, then of course eventually moved to the opposite, the countryside of Long Island, but he always liked big cities. So he escaped from Spoleto to Rome as often as he could, and one day there, literally by chance, he bumped into an old friend, the sculptor Herzl Emanuel, whom he had met many years before when both men were working in the WPA program during the Depression. One thing led to another and Emanuel invited de Kooning to a small foundry he ran in Trastevere. De Kooning was obviously very fascinated by the foundry, which was so, in a way, old-fashioned. As Gary said, at that time artists rarely worked in bronze. Emanuel offered him the opportunity to experiment, and de Kooning selected thirteen little sculptures he made in clay to be cast in bronze and sent to the United States. There the sculptor Henry Moore saw them and suggested to de Kooning’s dealer that he might enlarge them to any scale. From 1970 to 1974, sculpture became a central concern for de Kooning, which we are also going to show.

A number of artists who are known principally as painters also made sculptures occasionally, in practices that are visually quite independent. What fascinated me with de Kooning was that in working in sculpture, he really made a transposition of his paintings in a three-dimensional way; he kept the same feeling, the same sense of activity, if you like, that you see in his paintings. There is a direct connection.

Going back to the ’50s, another interesting thing that both of us observed was that at the time, especially in Italy, there was a big debate between figuration and abstraction, and in Italy that debate typically had very political connotations. The Communist Party, which had a big influence on our culture, was really against abstraction. So there was an intense debate about this tension, especially among Italian artists, and de Kooning worked in both categories and helped to define a hybrid. Gary, how would you explain that?

GGDe Kooning was one of the essential and most important of the abstract artists in New York in the 1940s and ’50s, the period of what we call the New York School, or Abstract Expressionism. He was one of the leaders, but he was the only one of that group of artists—Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and others—who had trained academically in Europe, in the Netherlands. And he never lost interest in the history of art. So even as he was among the most inventive and most important of the abstract artists, he also continued to consider the work of the European masters. The Metropolitan Museum in New York of course has a fantastic collection, and he went there a lot and looked at the old master paintings. But coming to Italy was a chance to see the great works by Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese in their original context. And in Rome, he loved the great Baroque artists—Bernini comes up again and again. De Kooning was one of the only artists we define as Abstract Expressionist who had a more complicated relationship to the history of art. He loved the freedom, the creativity, the exploration and radicality of the New York School, but he also admired and studied and knew the history of European art. And he acknowledged not only the painters of European art history but also the sculptors.

The exhibition includes many figurative drawings, but also paintings from 1975 to 1987, when de Kooning went back to abstraction. That abstraction again shows the influence of the figure and drawing. It’s like a thread that just constantly twists. He was an artist who continually changed, who continually reinvented his work, who would go back to things he had done before and renew them. He was an artist who worked over sixty years without ever losing the excitement of discovery in new work.

We could talk for a long time about this. We’re so thrilled that this exhibition is being presented here at the Accademia in Venice, because Venice has, of course, the great Peggy Guggenheim Collection, with great Pollocks and other examples of the New York School. And here at the Accademia we have the great Titians and Tintorettos, which are as deeply embedded in the work of de Kooning as the New York painters. In Venice we also have great modern sculpture, and we will include a sculpture by Auguste Rodin, a sculpture by Medardo Rosso, and a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti in the exhibition to provide a deeper, richer context for understanding de Kooning’s sculpture and how much it’s part of the history of the modernist sculpture that he continued and carried forward. So between the Guggenheim Collection and the Accademia and the other great art already here in Venice, it’s a perfect context here.

MCDe Kooning’s work was highlighted in the Venice Biennales of 1950, 1954, and 1956, but he was not yet a US citizen and couldn’t come to Italy without risking not being allowed back. Also, obviously, travel was a different matter then: it was more common than it would be now not to go to your own show. But from his correspondence with various people, it’s evident that de Kooning was fascinated by Venice. Each time he came to Italy, in 1959, 1969, and a brief visit in 1972, he came to Venice, but he stayed for short periods and didn’t have the same relationship that he had with Rome.

Needless to say, one thing he found fascinating about Venice was that it’s on water, which visually was always extremely important in his work. It makes perfect sense, and in a way is one of the elements that emerged from this exhibition. For example, we noticed that some of the sculptures and paintings of the ’60s seem to have people immersed in liquids. Perhaps this is something he saw through Bernini’s fountains in Rome—of course there isn’t a direct connection, but they both have that space where the body and the water melt into one element.

GGAgain, de Kooning never lost his desire to look at things in a new and fresh way. He was always challenging himself, always taking in new ways of thinking. This exhibition looks at the last thirty years of his life, the huge transition from the 1950s to the 1980s. That’s when he decided he would move out of New York. And coming to Italy was pivotal, it renewed him.

I don’t think de Kooning thought of himself as European or even as quintessentially American. He brought together these influences—and that’s part of why he’s so vital, so interesting, because he was so open.

MCAnother thing we discussed as we were developing the show was that on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1960s, artists were stopping painting or making traditional sculpture and instead were using their own bodies for artistic expression. I don’t think that’s purely coincidental, even if I can’t prove it. And when de Kooning was in Spoleto in 1969, he saw the Orlando Furioso directed by Luca Ronconi, which was designed so that there was no difference between actors and public, and the performance was very physical. I don’t think that was a direct inspiration but I imagine de Kooning combining it all into his art. All great artists are copycats, but when they take something they make something entirely different. Great artists absorb all they have around them and make something completely original. It’s how to be in the spirit of one’s own time.