Andrew Lambirth

Two American Masters

de Kooning: Late Paintings, Skarstedt, 8 Bennet Street, London, 4 October – 25 November 2017

Brice Marden, Gagosian, 20 Grosvenor Hill, London, 4 October – 22 December 2017

There hasn’t been a solo show of Brice Marden’s work in this country since the impressive display of swirling line paintings at the Serpentine Gallery in the winter of 2000-2001. That’s a long time to wait for the chance to look again at one of the most important contemporary practitioners of lyrical abstract painting, but it seems to be rather typical of how American painting is shown (or rather not shown) in the UK. I have called before for a museum to be founded here dedicated entirely to American painting. What a revelation that would be: getting to know America’s best and brightest in real depth, rather than being rationed to the occasional commercial exhibition or even rarer museum show. Americans are much better at philanthropy than we are–cannot some rich US benefactor(s) set up an institution for the promulgation of American art in the British Isles? It’s certainly about time. But in default of that, it is a real pleasure to report on two exhibitions of work by major American artists, both mounted by commercial galleries, and both offering key insights into a particular period of the artist’s work.

Marden’s recent paintings are being shown at Gagosian and de Kooning’s late paintings were at Skarstedt. Gagosian is getting a reputation for putting on substantial museum-quality exhibitions in its palatial Grosvenor Hill galleries (the glorious Michael Andrews exhibition earlier this year springs to mind, also the Giacometti and Yves Klein show staged in the early summer of 2016), and Marden’s immensely focused investigations of a single colour, terre verte, look very beautiful in those superbly light ground-floor rooms. Meanwhile, Skarstedt, a New York dealership founded in 1994 by the Swedish collector Per Skarstedt, opened new premises in St James’s in

October 2016. The gallery remit is to focus on contemporary European and American artists of the late twentieth century. Skarstedt doesn’t represent artists as such, preferring to amass the products of a particular period in order to stage a highly curated exhibition, more like a museum retrospective, but much more tightly focused. For example, the gallery opened with an exhibition of Cindy Sherman’s ‘History Portraits’ (from 1988-90) and David Salle’s ‘Tapestry Paintings’ (made between 1989 and 1991). Now we are shown just eight paintings from de Kooning’s controversial late period (1982-6), and deeply intriguing they are too.

The last time we had an opportunity to study late de Kooning (a minimal style characterised by floating ribands of colour on a white ground) was in the artist’s historic Tate retrospective of 1995. I remember that show and being shocked at the spareness of the imagery, and at the critical response to it. There was much talk of de Kooning’s condition as a sufferer from Alzheimer’s, and whether this disqualified him or not from painting. Richard Dorment in The Daily Telegraph saw de Kooning’s 1980s pictures as the lull after the storm (I thought the lull generally came before the storm), ‘a relaxing of tension mingled with the memory of what has gone before’. He also characterised the dry wavy ribbons as ‘like the spectre of a painting, or a painting on water.’ Tim Hilton in The Independent on Sunday thought the late work barren: ‘monotonous and then tragically empty.’ That great controversialist Brian Sewell, writing in the Evening Standard, asked: ‘Is it possible for a man whose mind is so lost that he cannot recall yesterday to remain a creative genius, if indeed he ever was one?’ Sewell even suggested that others must have painted the late canvases as de Kooning himself was beyond it.

Looking again at paintings from this final period of a great artist’s long life is a strange and in many ways sombre experience. I can’t believe that they were painted by assistants, but in a sense there were created by another hand, because the de Kooning of the 1950s or 1970s was not the man of the 1980s. In 1959, de Kooning said: ‘I see something that excites me. It becomes my content.’ By the mid-1980s he was projecting his own earlier drawings onto blank canvas and tracing the forms. His art had become

essentially self-referential, art about art. This sounds a little like treading water rather than swimming. In 1982, de Kooning is reported as saying: ‘There’s no end really, I just stop it. Abandon it.’ As if art (and perhaps life) had become something of a meaningless tape-loop, to be picked up or put down at random. Apparently, de Kooning carried on painting even after he could no longer write his name. David Sylvester, who curated the Tate show and acted as apologist for the late work, comparing it to Matisse’s late cutouts, referred to the 80s work as ‘paintings which have the poetry of utterances from a far distance’. There was indeed a feeling of otherworldliness to the works on show at Skarstedt.

The defining quality of de Kooning’s work prior to the 1980s had been its focus on the physical qualities of oil paint. He painted allover abstractions, great gestural walls of paint, lush cataracts of fleshly colour and sweet foaming buttery pigment, evoking landscape or the human body in a stream of momentary impressions. (He referred to himself as a ‘slipping glimpser’.) As de Kooning in the 1980s unravelled the density of his earlier work, reducing the painterliness to graphic patterns, the references changed from bodies to skeletons. Should this last period be seen as an intentional emptying out of lushness, a stripping back to essentials, or as an echo of internal emptiness? Are these paintings a diary of his own failing powers, a morbid testament to the disappearance into Alzheimer’s of the artist’s identity?

Although the late works are undeniably linear in thrust and execution, there is no sign of what Robert Hughes called ‘the wristy, virile, probing action of de Kooning’s line’. The effects are deliberately thin: the line has been fragmented into spectral Art Nouveau ribbons dancing in space, a kind of hymn to sinuosity. The so-called white paintings are not in fact what they first seem, passages of colour on a white ground, for much of the white is overpainting, cancelling out previous imagery, though leaving a trace of form or colour behind. There is often quite a build-up of pigment as marks are countermanded and obscured, while new darting, swerving tongues of colour, licks and little lavishes of paint, are promoted as replacement imagery. Echoes of former presences occur rather than downright absences. Here there might be a suggestion of a female body, there a boomerang of

black (see Untitled VIII of 1983). Elsewhere, hints are visible of charcoal underdrawing ( Untitled XLII, also 1983), or violet edges and underpainting ( Untitled XII, 1985). Untitled XXIX has an unexpected feeling of Leger about it. Sometimes the lines look too obvious, like magnets attracting and repelling each other with inevitability, not subtlety (as in the untitled red and blue painting of 1985). The imagery then is reminiscent of dead-end tributaries of river deltas, meanders, ox bow lakes, or pockets, with their own particular sexual overtones; there’s also something of the cussedness of an unmanned skipping rope.

Some of these paintings improve on prolonged acquaintance, others don’t. The final canvas (though not the last in date), hanging on its own in the end gallery, is the simplest and most reduced, makes black or grey paint look like charcoal, and reduces the palette to blue-black, black and blue. If it wasn’t for the soft pinks and apricots barely visible beneath the surface, creating a rich background noise of suggestion, the imagery in this painting would, quite simply, not be enough. The filaments flicker but they don’t offer a strong light: clearly the system is shutting down. As a coda to a life in paint they have great poignancy, but as paintings in their own right they look sketchy and unfinished: spectral glimmers from an abandoned power station.

Remembering the looping lines of the Serpentine exhibition, you would expect Brice Marden to appreciate late de Kooning, but his latest paintings revert to the lyrical minimalism of his earlier career, far from the sprung linearity of the 1990s. In the 1970s and 80s, Marden made paintings consisting of vertical bands or blocks of subdued abutting colour. His pictures were human-sized, not the vast arenas of so much American Modernism, and their many-layered surfaces suggested organic growth rather than aseptic geometry. Although there were architectural references, the colour was organic too, with an inner glow that suggested the light of the sky, or sunlight on water or stone. Marden’s work has always been subtle and beautiful, but the latest series – all ten of which explore a single colour terre verte – plumb new depths of particularity.

Marden has used terre verte before, but never so exclusively. These new paintings have a uniformity of format (each measures 96” x 72”), and the top three-quarters of each upright canvas is saturated in a particular brand of terra verte, then named after the make of paint. The bottom quarter is contrastingly pale, a distillate of the colour above, abraded with driplines and smudges. This lower panel acts as a predella in the manner of Italian altarpieces, offering a kind of commentary on the process which has resulted in the dense matt colour above. The top section of each painting absorbs light, the lower gives it back. Without the lower bands these paintings might be good but simply serene; the dialogue between top and bottom (also, incidentally, between square and rectangle) is what gives these pictures their distinctive character.

The series is about layering, about different depths and intensities, cool and warm, dark and light. Tone is as important as hue. Of course the look of these canvases will alter throughout the day with the changing light, and their appearance will be difficult (if not impossible) to photograph. To experience these paintings properly, it is essential to walk back and forth in front of them, stopping at times to peer more closely, then backing up to get the wider view. (No sculpture here to trip over.) Although ostensibly all green, the range of colour is in fact remarkable, especially as different brands have different covering powers. Sennelier approaches black, while Vasari Ancienne is a particularly warm hue, a rather glossy rich brown. Holbein and Williamsburg are among my favourites. These sumptuous, understated paintings at one moment resemble weathered copper, at another beaten pewter or polished leather. They operate at the opposite pole from de Kooning’s bare minimalism. Brice Marden’s masterly investigations of medium and subject have never looked so bewitching.