His Hand
Peter Schjeldahl

Look at your hand, the one you draw with. Everybody has drawn. Pressing an instrument against a surface, your hand moves, leaving substance from the instrument behind. The movement accords with something in your mind that dictates direction, pressure, rhythm, and so on. The mental factor, which may be urgent or gratuitous and serious or silly, does its work whether you are conscious of it or not.

What is your hand’s identity? Is it you or is it yours, yourself or something like property? Does it express or only serve you? Certainly, it is purposeful. It broadcasts capacity for action. What can it do? What can’t it? What should or shouldn’t it do? Why are hands sometimes slapped, handcuffed, or, in Afghanistan, judiciously chopped off?

Imagine that your hand is that of somebody terrifically skilled: a surgeon, a violinist, a shortstop. Feel your esteem for this object that is not an object rise. Now imagine that your hand is paralyzed and useless. Tragedy.

Finally, think of Willem de Kooning’s hand, the one he draws with. It had the same complement of blood vessels, muscles, and nerves as your own, which your are scrutinizing. It was fantastically skilled, of course, but in ways not readily comprehended. It was hardly handicapped, but it was subject to strangenesses. You might say that it was palsied by genius, if you don’t mind that word “genius.” I can’t think of another word that fits, but only bunches of words that come down in the same place.

Simply, no scale of comparison, derived from normal experience, exists for what matters most when de Kooning drew, especially toward the end of his career. I include in this statement our normal experience of art. How does one rate the late drawings? I think that one can’t. Like Shakespeare’s sonnets — the all-time model for prodigies of renegade creation — they are something apart, beggaring judgments of good and bad. They can seem both eccentric and generic, less kinds of drawings than oddly accented, sudden, summary propositions about drawing as drawing.

I submit that de Kooning’s hand occupied the place of everybody’s hands when he drew without predictable style, as he did more often than not from the early 1960s onwards in an adventure of draftsmanship whose every mark is like a sound that breaks a silence. We are startled continually by the products of de Kooning’s hand, no matter how familiar we become with them. The products keep playing hob with our senses of what we know and are. We struggle for inward balance as we gaze.

The body of drawing here surveyed is the unquietest in the world. It teems. It is an irrepressible turmoil, a steady-state rumpus. It is also somehow exquisitely poised throughout. It may appear willfully messy, as if in thrall to a spirit of negligence, but never, not once, does it issue in a mess. Given a minimum of receptive looking, every welter of lines or blotches coheres as some species of image. Could any mark be altered or omitted without loss? The notion is unthinkable. The most incidental-seeming scrawl may, at some instant of viewing, be a particular drawing’s fulcrum of passion. While courting gross chaos, most of the work is remarkably fast and light in its effects, as frictionless as Mozart.

De Kooning’s hand jumps at us everywhere in gestures as peremptory as a jab or a tickle. We feel as well as see what it does. We feel it in our hands! My own hand twitches at times like a dreaming dog when I contemplate a de Kooning drawing — as my whole arm may in the case of a de Kooning painting, infected by the ferocious choreography of his brushstrokes. Yet more powerfully kinesthetic is the artist’s lyrically punched and fondled sculpture, a raid on the third dimension with which he briefly extended his process into social space.

The physicality of de Kooning’s sculptures — running the hand movements of his drawing and painting into masses of ductile stuff — cannot be overstated. It reminds me of an image from the New Testament: the hand of Doubting Thomas conducted to touch the spear wound in the resurrected Jesus’s side. Think of what a wound is; how a wound looks. The facture of such de Kooning Sculptures as Clamdigger stirs similar sensations of shocking intimacy and matter-of-factness, enforcing the same terrible authority of physical knowledge. Not to touch de Kooning’s sculptures, at least in thought, is not to engage them in a meaningful way.

When we look at de Kooning’s late drawings, we automatically track what his hand is up to — as when one hangs on the exact words of a great poem or notes of a riveting jazz solo. Because we are lazy, we seek excuses to break off that grueling concentration, the sustaining of which is thus the sternest test of any artist’s power. I emphasize the mental focus of our response to de Kooning’s drawings because nothing else in art beats it. Others have drawn with equally superlative eye, intellect, and, for want of better terms, heart and guts, but the Dutchman owns the hand.

De Kooning’s friend and sometime mentor Arshile Gorky showed him technical and formal means to make eloquent spectacles of feeling with varieties of line. Other artists who come to mind, more by affinity than as even possible influences, tend to be rather isolated individuals: Edvard Munch, Chaim Soutine, Giacometti, perhaps Henri Michaux. (We recall, in each case, like the taste of Proust’s madeleine, the savor of an exceedingly peculiar sort of line in and of itself.) But de Kooning’s drawings are not contained, let alone explained, by family resemblances.

When I attempt to conjure a historical and aesthetic context for these drawings, there stretches before me an endless vista of drawing per se, including peaks of da Vinci and Picasso and swamps of your and my doodles. I conclude that the actual and constant subject of this work is drawing and something that humans do. What happens when we draw? Why do we bother about it? What can it mean? After the early 1960s, de Kooning’s hand seldom strayed from the ground zero of those homely mysteries.

Each sheet is a discovery. It’s less as if de Kooning set out to make a drawing than as if, at a given moment, he would find himself drawing again, to his surprise. Every acute de Kooning critic notes the uncanny middleness of his art, a phenomenon ever unfolding between inexplicable beginnings and inconceivable ends. Except when the word is “Woman,” there are few nouns or pronouns — either subject of object — in a de Kooning visual sentence, which is most usually unmoored verb and adverb and the odd itinerant adjective. We get not what a thing is but in what manner it is and how it behaves.

Things in de Kooning behave with generosity and anguish for the most part. They are palpably pressured and goaded, whipped into activity. What drives them? I don’t know. Here we enter spiritual zones where de Kooning gives us negative guidance. Among the century’s great artists, he was an outstanding materialist and pragmatist. He was anti-gnostic: Mr. Take It Or Leave It, never minding that “It” was boundlessly ambiguous. His model for being an artist was having a job. How does one square this with profundity? One doesn’t try, if one is wise.

The single defining project to which de Kooning ever submitted himself pertained to a certain moment in history, whose end is felt in the earliest of these drawings. In the end of cultural revolution after World War II, he undertook to reconfigure European-type mastery for his adopted nation, performing roughly the service in painting that George Balanchine fulfilled in ballet. He forged an art at once vernacularly American and palpably continuous with Rubens and Ingres. His reward was dubious. As it turned out, many Americans hankered for something at once more aesthetically radical and transcendentally nebulous, which we got from Jackson Pollock. It seemed for a while that de Kooning had been defeated. In fact, he was freed.

The earlier work here, from calligraphic ink drawings related to de Kooning’s abstract landscape paintings of the late 1950s through a circa 1965 suite of spavined nudes in charcoal on lined legal paper, enacts a devolution of style: terminal spasms of a “de Kooning look.” The gamy Women are piercingly poignant in this regard, as not only a valediction of the artist on his formerly dominant theme but a ghostly coda of a grand, sensual metaphysic — the equation art material = female flesh — that had reigned in Western art from the Venetian Renaissance to Picasso and Matisse. When viewing these drawings think of Titian’s Venuses. The two bodies of work bracket a now lost civilization.

By the late 1960s, de Kooning had plainly accepted that his hand was unemployed by art history: overqualified for contemporary art’s assigned tasks in a downsizing industry of the spirit. He could have turned bitter — others turned bitter on his behalf — but he did not. It is hard to say just what he turned. He was a baffling man! But the adjustment of his hand is blazingly apparent. That hand commenced to expand without regret or stint its whole accumulated capital of ability and memory. A hand trained by the Rotterdam Academy (before Cubism and Gorky taught it modern moves) and long accustomed to being audacious went for broke.

I started by noting that something in the mind directs one’s hand when one draws. We commonly value drawings for a sense they give of harmonious accord between mental proposal and manual execution. “Academic” taste so adores such accord that it forgets to weigh the worth of the mental proposal, tolerating weary and trivial motives. Late de Kooning is academicism’s polar opposite: positively cultivating discord with and between contents of the mind that, though we cannot begin to sort them out, feel as vital and fundamental as fight-or-flight options in an emergency.

De Kooning’s hand in his late drawings can seem to overrule, on principle, whatever his mind has told it to do. The principle is the most pronounced visual commitment to personal liberty in art history. The hand in these drawings embodies not only all hands but an all-hands mutiny on a ship — the individualist paradigm of artistic significance — that in the art worlds of the 1960s and 1970s, furthermore, appeared to be sinking. The ship did not perish, after all. Today American art culture makes amends to the much-insulted prerogatives of individual talent, which is back in esteem. But don’t even think of apologizing to de Kooning’s hand. It would ridicule you.

A hovering demonism of mockery, compounded by something like despair and something like exaltation, attends these drawings, as if forbidding us to take them straight. Sheer giddiness, if not “the melodrama of vulgarity” that de Kooning once complained of being captive to, asserts itself in whiffs of wacky figuration and landscape elements knocked around like bowling pins. At other times, linear and painterly marks (most insolently in casual monoprints, often on newspaper, from temporary states of paintings) all but boast of being as mindless as a child kicking a stone along a sidewalk on a summer afternoon.

But oh, the specifics of the drawings! By which I mean just about every single touch of an instrument to paper, even in background passages of the scribble-and-find technique whereby one lays down a flurry of random lines and then picks out, say, faces in it. Randomness eluded de Kooning. He was incapable of formlessness. When he left a mark, it couldn’t help but vibrate with a space-making, just-so quiddity. I fancy him as a faerie Frankenstein whose inventions, instantly breaking free of whatever he meant for them, swarms the world with uncontrollable, fearsome aliveness.

I think that Willem de Kooning was a hand with a man attached. Through epochs of ideology, cerebral artifice, and toxic irony in contemporary art, that hand kept singing like a bird of what hands can know. Present history amplifies the song. We ought to answer it. How?