Willem de Kooning’s Excavations of Intimacy

Drawings, like dreams, can often feel open-ended, prompting a multiplicity of thoughts. As painting’s poor cousins, they usually command a lesser fee in the art market, and their position somewhat to the left of capital may account—at least in part—for the fantastic, unfixed energy you often find in them: an artist draws not in the service of a career but in search of a self. Drawings, for me, are a kind of calligraphy of the soul, and, as you take in “Willem de Kooning Drawing” (at the Art Institute of Chicago through September 20th), it’s the enormous spirit behind many of the works—a searching spirit—that holds your attention, as do the artist’s questions about line, volume, voice, what the eye sees, and what the hand is capable of.

De Kooning drew throughout his long creative life. (He died in 1997, at the age of ninety-two.) When he allowed the younger artist Robert Rauschenberg to erase one of his drawings for the piece “Erased de Kooning Drawing” (1953), he knew that part of the poetry of the work would be the idea of him watching himself disappear. It would have been a nice touch to include “Erased de Kooning Drawing”—a bridge between modernist and postmodernist thinking—in this first major show of de Kooning’s works on paper, but, even without seeing it, you can keep it in mind as you study de Kooning’s own ghostly markings.

De Kooning, who grew up with almost nothing and then had everything, struggled with both deprivation and abundance. His story? It’s such an American one, especially if you think of having grown up elsewhere as definitively American. Born in Rotterdam in 1904, he was the child of Cornelia and Leendert de Kooning. His father, closed off and remote, tried to make a living bottling beer. His mother, hemmed in by poverty and the limitations of gender, had a dramatic personality and thought nothing of expressing her rage. Her anger was the great event of her life—and of her son’s. De Kooning’s affable but aloof personality was formed in part in reaction to Cornelia’s volubility; as a young man, he became known for his ability to defuse fights in bars and for his interest in theatrical women. His parents separated when he was two, and he shuttled back and forth between them through his childhood and adolescence. Still, his destitution and his spiritual orphanhood did nothing to eclipse the pleasure that he found, from an early age, in drawing.

There was no explaining de Kooning’s aptitude for art. Though he didn’t get far in his formal education—he left school at the age of twelve, and that was that—his teachers noticed his talent, and so did Cornelia’s second husband, Jacobus Lassooy, a barkeep. Because drawing was a marketable skill, Lassooy took the boy to various places to see if he could get work. He was accepted as an apprentice at a design firm that specialized in interior decoration. De Kooning’s renderings there were strong enough that, after some time, his boss encouraged him to apply to the Academie van Beeldende Kunsten en Technische Wetenschappen, a technical art school in Rotterdam.

In the school’s drawing program, de Kooning copied classical works, mostly from Greece. He was also trained in commercial art. The experience forever bonded him to artisans. As Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan point out in their definitive 2004 biography, “De Kooning: An American Master,” the young de Kooning’s development was unlike that “of many later artists, who grew up when becoming an artist was considered more a matter of temperament than of know-how. De Kooning began by learning the hows, rather than the whys. His hand led his mind.” Rotterdam was a port town, and its red-light district, full of music and women—and conveniently situated near the Academie—was one of the jazziest in Holland. That scene, the energy of it, nourished de Kooning: the accidents of life, the meetings and partings in an environment dominated by sound, fed his imagination, as did his dreams of freedom, and of becoming an artist.