"There is a very literal allusion to Guernica in Pink Angels: de Kooning has placed a small outline drawing of that upturned head just above the knee of the big, seated angel. But again, while the image content and figural distortion of Picasso's mural were unquestionably of interest to him, its spatial construction was of greater interest and of more fundamental importance to the future of his art. Here, de Kooning reprises the more mobile of Picasso's paper-thin planes—some opaque, some transparent, some outlined but not filled in—that overlap to create complex, unexpected interactions of figure and ground. His shape vocabulary, however, comes less from Guernica and more from Picasso's abstracted, metamorphic compositions of the mid-to-late 1920s, among them, Michael FitzGerald has observed, Figure (1927;fig.2 ), a work that de Kooning could have known from Albert H. Barr Jr.'s, Picasso: Forty years of his Art (1939). But de Kooning goes far beyond his source —and what he himself had done earlier — in placing his arching charcoal lines on top and independent of the big humanoid shapes as well around them.
Picasso is certainly not the only early modernist behind Pink Angels. It is de Kooning's first great work of inventive synthesis, and as such also draws upon paintings by Henri Matisse and Joan Miró, and probably upon specific canvases by these artists. Miró's Dutch Interior of 1928 was acquired by the The Museum of Modern Art in the year that Pink Angels was painted; de Kooning appears to have paid attention not only to its overall metamorphic figuration but also to specific motifs, among them the thrusting shape of the lute across the center of the composition and the rectangle resting on its bottom edge, surrounded by abstracted animals. In place of Miró's dog and cat, though, de Kooning has adapted a fish head, at lower left, and a scurrying crablike creature, at lower right, from images at Pieter Brueghel the Elder's prints of The Last Judgement and The Seven Vices, thereby shifting the comic tone of Miró's version of the grotesque to something more primal - a quality also evoked by his more aggressively colliding forms, perhaps meant to evoke a clash of warrying angels.
That aggressive aspect distinguishes Pink Angels from the painting by Matisse that surely gave it and Pink Lady the color in their titles, namely the so-called Pink Nude of 1935. De Kooning followed Matisse's use of a figural shape to compose a painting, and of the shape of the painting to compose the figure within it - only doing so with greater abandon. Given his own, obsessive reworking of his paintings, this one included, he would likely would have been attracted to Pink Nude for the many states it went through in its development, eight of which had been illustrated in Roger Fry's book on Matisse, published in New York in 1935. Bue whereas Matisse now removed all traces of process from the finished composition, de Kooning courted the effect of separate states having been overlaid in the completion of Pink Angels. He was continuing to use tracings to position and reposition drawn shapes beside and above each other on the canvas as he worked, a technique that indubitably helps to acount for the complex layering and sudden, shifting dissonances that animate the works surface.
(...)
em De Kooning: a Retrospective, o catálogo de uma exposição retrospectiva no MoMA.
No comments:
Post a Comment