Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Christa Noel Robbins reviews Willem de Kooning Nonstop

Rosalind E. Krauss. Willem de Kooning Nonstop: Cherchez la femme. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 176 pp.

Review by Christa Noel Robbins

10 May 2016

In the early 2000s Rosalind Krauss issued a missive directed at those scholars who continued to insist that Jackson Pollock’s paintings should be understood either as a celebration of their materiality or in the context of his personality—twin reductions that she understood to be egregious misunderstandings of the paintings’ significance. She begins the missive with a recollection of Lee Krasner’s exasperation over the latest attempt to explain away Pollock’s painting through some biographical kernel. Krauss excuses Krasner’s anger, and her own, by relating that for “artists and intellectuals” of Krasner’s generation modernism was “a creed, a belief, a deepest form of commitment.” “It was,” she continues, “both a politics and a religion.”[1] Krauss herself has played the role of a kind of intercessor within the church of modernism for the last five decades. In that role she has provided a voice, not for the individuals occupying the modernist field, but for the paintings that seek entry there. It goes without saying that along with this role comes a requisite amount of faith or—to use the language that Stanley Cavell was generating around the time Krauss first started writing art criticism—conviction. The conviction that Krauss espouses is not a faith in the absolute and unwavering value of art in itself but something more like the conviction in visual art’s ability to obtain meaning and to do so through highly reflective, analytical, and historically conscious means. That meaning is obtained via carefully cultivated relationships—with the past, with technical structures, with affective expectations. The list goes on. For each meaning-generating relationship is determined by a contingent set of factors. Krauss’s term for this ever changing set of factors out of which meaning might be generated is medium—a concept that is defined by Krauss in terms of its requisite variability and its utter necessity.

The relationship that Krauss pursues in her latest book, De Kooning Nonstop: Cherchez la femme, is between Willem de Kooning the abstract expressionist and the subject matter, woman. Krauss’s primary aim is to unseat the reading of de Kooning’s recursive return to the female figure in his Woman paintings as concerned solely with the sexual drama that series evokes—the Woman paintings are notoriously violent depictions of grotesque, Gorgonesque women, which are easily read as rising out of a deep-seated misogyny or fear. As the subtitle of her book implies, however, Krauss understands this to be a thin analysis of the paintings as trope: behind every drama there lies a woman. The “rush to the signified”[2] that this entails ignores the deeper formal complexities that Krauss argues underwrite de Kooning’s inability to stop: “to put the entire theme of the Woman to rest” (p. 3). The relation figured in this series is not simply, Krauss demonstrates, that between de Kooning the man and the imaginary figure, woman. It is rather a triangulation, where woman is returned to repeatedly as a fulcrum in a historical relation: between model, painter, and canvas. As such, Krauss argues that woman was a means, a “nexus” (p. 23), a “template” (p. 9) within which de Kooning could meditate on the meaningfulness of painting itself—in particular, the manner in which painting always embeds within its form a point-of-view that is triangulated between that which is to be depicted (model), depiction (canvas), and painter. Krauss traces the modernist precedent for the laying bare of this relation to Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.

The “triplex template” of model/canvas/painter is legible in and as the point of view afforded in Woman I (1950–1952), as a doubled imprint of de Kooning’s vertical body in the form, first, of the upright torso of the represented model, which mirrors de Kooning’s own, and, second, as an alternate view angling down at the top of the model’s legs, indicating a point-of-view from slightly above. The traces of a window at the top right of the canvas, which Krauss discerns largely through documentation of previous states of the painting, reads as a figure for the material substrate that is the canvas connecting these twinned views. Placed behind the model, it is woman, as figure, that comes between de Kooning as author and that picture surface, mediating their relation, demonstrating the historical weight that intercedes as de Kooning approaches, once again, a structural relationship that comes to him from the history of painting itself. Krauss uses this fulcrum by which de Kooning enters his own picture to return us to the existential discourse that was “in the air” (p. 48) at the time the Woman paintings were made, demonstrating that if woman as archetype can be read (as it often is) as existential dread, it is a dread attributable equally to the practice of painting as to woman. Krauss links de Kooning’s reading of Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling with his possible exposure to more contemporaneous essays such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “Cézanne’s Doubt” (published in Partisan Review in September 1946), in order to show that the existential doubt expressed in both essays could be grounded in a historical form such as painting (pp. 49–53). “Cézanne’s Doubt” is, in fact, an essay that questions the idea of unmediated pictorial expression (of the kind that art historians continue to attribute to de Kooning) and argues that intuited sensation is never free from reflective judgment. This is the same point that Krauss makes about de Kooning’s Woman paintings. Yes, they’re highly improvisational; yes, the choice of woman as subject is indelibly wrapped up in the politics of gender and sexuality. But these aspects of the paintings are never free from the historical form that is painting and to disregard how they are manifest within that historical structure is to radically misunderstand not only their meaning but also how meaning is even possible in the form of painting.

An unmediated expressive action and a misogynistic approach to the subject of woman: These are easily discernible in de Kooning’s paintings. What is less easily discerned is the manner by which such contents relate to and open up within the structure of painting as historical form. That latter understanding, which is what differentiates painting from any other statement, gesture, or action in the world, can only be had through close reading—the kind of close reading that Krauss provides as an intercessor of modernism. She is a “canny reader of pictures,” which is also her description of de Kooning. But it may be that the rhetorical sophistication of that readership can be viewed, as Krauss’s recourse to the history of art intimates, only within the enclosed space of modernism itself, that it is only from within such a contained space that paintings can make sense in precisely the manner Krauss maps out in this text. If so, one wonders whether we will lose these paintings when the intercessions of figures like Krauss come to a stop. The short answer is: most likely. For as the paintings age, thick with history and embedded in critical discourse, their need for the readings of modernists like Krauss has only become more acute. It is for this reason that we should continue to read Krauss, nonstop.


[1] Rosalind Krauss, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” in Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York, 2000), p. 155.

[2] Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Silvia Kolbowski, Miwon Kwon and Benjamin Buchloh, “The Politics of the Signifier: A Conversation on the Whitney Biennial,” October 66 (Autumn 1993): 7.