These people don’t know what they’re talking about, but I do! That was the message—the kind that often presages a new critic—from the twenty-nine-year-old painter Elaine de Kooning to Thomas B. Hess, the twenty-seven-year-old managing editor of ART news, in 1948. Founded in 1902, the magazine was primarily devoted to art historical essays and reports on old master acquisitions, while dutifully neglecting new developments in its hometown of New York City. Hess had studied at Yale, specializing in French art history, and was knowledgeable about a lineage of criticism stretching from the salon reviews of Denis Diderot to poet-critics like Charles Baudelaire writing within densely constellated scenes. After two years at ART news, he was starting to feel the electricity emanating from artists’ studios downtown and wanted to hear her out.

In 1948 de Kooning was a decade into her relationship with her husband, Willem de Kooning, and at the center of a cyclone of making and talking and looking that engulfed New York artists of the 1930s and 1940s, from Arshile Gorky to Franz Kline. She had studied with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown and with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College. She attended dance performances with her neighbor Edwin Denby and discussed his reviews—which rank among the finest criticism of the period—as he wrote them, measuring her perceptions against his and seeing how writing on deadline gets done, and she was ready to undertake her own. Yet a critic who was also an artist, and furthermore the wife of an artist, presented an ethical problem. The New York art world was small. Wouldn’t she just flatter her subjects? They’re all my friends, she reassured Hess. “I know everybody. So, there’s no possibility of favoritism.” De Kooning became the first artist writing criticism for ART news at the moment it was poised to become the most important publication in American art.

What bonded Hess and Elaine de Kooning above all was a deep conviction that Willem de Kooning was the greatest living painter (perhaps allowing “American” as the only qualification until Picasso’s death in 1973). Hess wrote a number of reviews of his shows, articles and the first monograph on his work in 1959, and the catalog for the first retrospective, which he curated at MoMA in 1968 and which traveled internationally. These writings are suffused with quotations from de Kooning about his ideas and detailed descriptions of how his works were made. For her part, Elaine was a zealous and charismatic proselytizer. She, Hess, and their close friend the critic Harold Rosenberg—a formidable triumvirate—became Willem’s chief champions. (Both men were also Elaine’s lovers, which does not seem to have adversely affected their relationships with her husband or each other.)

In 1949 Hess debuted the “Paints a Picture” series: long, heavily illustrated profiles that followed an artist creating a single work from beginning to end. The format often underscored that making art was not reducible to a formula, something conceptualized and then executed. Rather, it was a mysterious unfolding: at every moment the process was subject to examination, reflection, and alteration, imbuing the object with the intelligence of its maker. Elaine’s hands-on knowledge of materials and process, as well as her comfort in the studio, made her well prepared to write this kind of essay; in the first years she was responsible for most of them, on everything from tempera paintings by Andrew Wyeth to steel sculptures by David Smith.

The “Paints a Picture” format proved highly adaptable during its twenty-year run, but above all it was ideal for explicating the formal and conceptual operations of Willem de Kooning. In “De Kooning Paints a Picture” (1953), Hess reconstructs the “vacillating, Hamlet-like history” of one of the defining works of postwar art: Woman I (1950–1953). His account details de Kooning’s year and a half of continuous work on the painting beginning in the spring of 1950, after which it was put away and new Woman paintings were embarked upon; then it was restretched and slightly altered, the artist never satisfied, until, as Hess puts it, “Woman escaped by truck from its creator” to be exhibited in 1953.

Hess renounces a linear progression in favor of cyclical struggle, in the making of the painting and also in art history more generally. Despite its appearance of having been painted at great speed, which seemed to bespeak Romantic self-expression, Woman I was the result of deeply considered and precisely wrought visual imperatives, comparable to the stringent Classicism of de Kooning’s hero, J.A.D. Ingres. Hess characterizes the painting’s rapid alterations, punctuated by methodical and contemplative stopgaps, as “ambiguity exactingly sought and exactingly left undefined.”

His analysis is guided by de Kooning’s idiosyncratic process: he traces shapes and lines from the painting onto vellum at various stages so he can consult them once they’re painted out; sometimes he transfers the lifted lines onto another part of the picture, often flipped or reversed or cut up. In between de Kooning scrapes and sands down parts of the picture, “leaving hints of contradictory outline in a jewel-like haze of iridescence,” as Denby put it, while striving to maintain an all-over freshness. All this is impossible to reconstruct solely by looking at the finished painting. By contrast, the working cartoons, along with the torrent of related drawings, collages, and pastels made before, during, and after Woman I provide an archaeological record of its coming into being. They hover around it like roiling psychic weather, extending it with endless alternative solutions—sought and considered, affirmed or rejected—and presenting the artist as a thinker of almost unfathomable virtuosity and seemingly limitless experimental capability.

The case study of the restless interaction of hand and mind first presented in “De Kooning Paints a Picture” is expanded to encompass his entire life’s work in the Art Institute of Chicago’s exhibition “Willem de Kooning Drawing.” It’s an instructive follow-up to the Museum of Modern Art’s magisterial “de Kooning: A Retrospective” of fifteen years ago, which included around two hundred works, only about a quarter of which were on paper, thus casting them in a traditional supporting role to the cavalcade of large canvases. By contrast, the Art Institute’s exhibition presents the same number of works with the proportions reversed: almost all are modestly scaled and on some form of paper, except for seven canvases and about a dozen bronze sculptures presented within the conceptual rubric of “drawing.”

To describe these as “paper” and “canvas” rather than “drawings” and “paintings” signals the sly provocation of the exhibition. As Hess writes in his authoritative study Willem de Kooning: Drawings (1972), in which he explicates a selection of 128 graphic works:

A close examination of de Kooning’s drawings first of all tends to dissolve any possible definition of “drawing.” It is as if this master draftsman had systematically eliminated the graphic as an element that can be isolated in art. One cannot even set the drawings apart by putting them in a category of “works on paper,” for many of de Kooning’s paintings are also on paper, and what collectors take to be oils on board or on canvas are in fact papers which have been mounted after the picture was finished. This eluding of categories and definitions is a major aspect of the content of de Kooning’s art.

What comes to the fore in the early paintings Seated Man (1939) and Queen of Hearts (1943–1946) is the decisive presence of charcoal lines worked and reworked into the picture, making it a hybrid object: a drawing embedded in paint. In later “paintings,” when this kind of drawing has melted into a skin of fluidly applied brushstrokes, these marks can be read as a continuation of drawing, a touch that finds and refines itself on the surface with immediacy and intimacy.

The exhibition is organized chronologically, following de Kooning’s biography alongside the formal evolution of certain sequences and the many experiments that are the connective tissue among the major works on view. Born in Rotterdam in 1904 to working-class parents who soon split acrimoniously, as a boy he shuttled between a physically and emotionally abusive mother and an eerily remote father, both of whom remarried and started new families. At twelve he was sent to work for six days a week at a prestigious decorator’s studio, where he learned everything from trompe l’oeil effects to sign lettering to art nouveau embellishment. He displayed such aptitude and diligence that the following year his employers sent him in the evenings to the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques, a rigorous training in design and fine art that continued for at least the next four or five years.

The earliest work in the exhibition, Dish with Jugs (circa 1919–1921), is the result of a yearlong assignment that produced a pristinely rendered still life, smudged and stippled so that no individual markings remain. It testifies to preternatural talent molded by classical beaux-arts training, which in combination with his commercial skills gave him a technical education far beyond that of the other artists who made up the New York School.

In 1926 the twenty-two-year-old de Kooning stowed away in the engine room of a steamer headed for the United States; his only English word was “yes.” After initially working as a house painter in the Dutch enclave in Hoboken, he moved to New York City the following year and was employed as a display designer for a shoe company while integrating himself into the artists’ community forming downtown. He then was able to paint full-time for the WPA, working on biomorphic abstract murals under the direction of Fernand Léger in 1935 and 1936. After he left the project he returned to a hand-to-mouth existence punctuated by odd jobs. Throughout the 1930s de Kooning focused on a series of carefully constructed though strangely unsettled portraits of men, under the influence of his close friends Gorky and John Graham. In 1938 he met Elaine Fried, a vivacious twenty-year-old art student from Brooklyn, whom he married five years later.

The first gallery of “Willem de Kooning Drawing” covers his first twenty-five years, displaying juvenilia with early flashes of brilliance—the zagging contours in an illustration of men’s suits already bear the skewed humor of his line—that lead to his mature works, in which something starts to coalesce around his explorations of the figure. Most striking, perhaps because it appears at first so unusual, is a small graphite portrait of Elaine (circa 1940–1941) made after they’d been together for a couple years but before they married. She sits in a tunic with slightly bunched drapery hiding the voluptuous body that de Kooning had begun to use as his figure model. Outlines and folds—a button on the cuff, fingernails—are depicted with utmost delicacy. But everything seems unfinished when compared to the face, where strokes utterly evaporate. No matter how closely you look at the eyelids, nostrils, or what Hess dubs the “tour-de-force rendition of the countercurves in the upper lip,” there are no lines, only a sculpted plane set back into the imaginary space of the drawing while resting on the surface of the paper.

It’s routinely described as Ingres-esque, but it has a psychological intensity unlike anything Ingres ever made. De Kooning is looking at Elaine as hard as he can, and she is looking back at him with equal vehemence, an unstoppable force confronting an immovable object. The disjunction between the face and everything else gives the image a feeling of having been fixated upon to the point of exhaustion, then suddenly abandoned. It was one of de Kooning’s last works that reached back to the immaculate academic still life, and Elaine recalled picking it up off the studio floor after he declared it the kind of drawing that “you could lose your mind doing.” Hess stresses in his commentary

that the sharp, taut, psychologically troubling quality in the drawing comes from the artist’s concentration on his chosen medium. De Kooning is not telling us an anecdote or engaging in autobiography. On the contrary; if he is obsessed, it is with the tiny motions of the pencil point.

Be that as it may, it is undeniable that whatever makes this drawing a representation of Elaine specifically—as opposed to any other young woman, fantasy or archetype—generates its almost terrifying power. Her own painted self-portraits from the mid-1940s share a strikingly similar look, produced by the artist locking eyes with herself in a mirror. And as unlikely as it might seem stylistically, this sketch prefigures Woman I: the same large eyes are blazing out of that work begun a decade later.

When pressed, de Kooning maintained that his Woman paintings “had to do with the female painted through all the ages, all those idols,” which is to say, with one of the central subjects of oil painting as it developed since the Renaissance. The assertion did nothing to stave off whatever biographical and psychoanalytic interpretations happened to be in vogue at the time: the hated mother, the overbearing wife, the classical goddess, the fertility idol. Elaine was annoyed enough by the gossip to ask Hans Namuth to photograph her in front of one of the Woman paintings, hoping to prove once and for all that it wasn’t a portrait of her. After that tongue-in-cheek gesture, she reported entering into a more complex relation to it: “I was fascinated to discover that I became part of the painting, as though I were the ‘Woman’s’ daughter and she had her hand, protectively, on my shoulder.”

How to navigate such entanglements of art and life—whether the painting invokes de Kooning’s mother or wife or Rubens’s Venus or the Venus of Willendorf, some combination of all of them, or none of them and is simply an arrangement of colored shapes—remains an insoluble question, suspended between extremes of formalist separation and illustrative reduction. That space of vertiginous contingency and mirage-like ambiguity is the true province of de Kooning’s art and can be uniquely accessed through his thousands of extant sketches, tracings, and collages.

The same year that Elaine began writing for ART news, Willem at age forty-four had his first solo exhibition, around ten teeming compositions that tremble between locking together and blowing apart, made of black and off-white enamel house paint accented with flashes of color. The brushwork combines luscious swells with tracery fine as a fencer’s point, activating not only the shapes themselves but the spaces between them, which step forward as shapes in their own right. In The Nation Clement Greenberg hailed de Kooning as “an outright ‘abstract’ painter,” purged of any “identifiable image.” Hot on the heels of Jackson Pollock’s first “drip” paintings exhibited months before, de Kooning seemed to fit a theory Greenberg was developing in response to the arrival of this new kind of painting. He deployed it to great rhetorical effect a few years later in his essay “‘American-Type’ Painting” (1955), which set the critical terms that haunted American art for the rest of the century.

According to Greenberg, for painting to be “truly alive in our time” it must undergo a trajectory of “self-purification,” shedding its inherited conventions one by one until it is a uniquely visual medium. A painting is a flat object, so to embrace this flatness the illusionistic “picture plane” of imagined depth must be pressed as close as possible to the surface until they all but merge. Because paintings are not actually people or landscapes or rooms or objects on a table, they should abandon such deceptions, allowing color, line, and shape to exist in their own elemental way. Narrative and language, the proper domain of literature and theater, ought also to be purged. Greenberg argued prophetically, almost mystically, that this was the only path forward for modern art, and he saw it as already underway in the work of a number of American painters—Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and above all Clyfford Still—each of whom, with utterly individual approaches, was creating “a new kind of flatness, one that breathes and pulsates…. Broken by relatively few incidents of drawing or design, their surfaces exhale color with an enveloping effect.”

But this wasn’t how de Kooning saw his paintings at all. He insisted that “art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity.” At a symposium on abstraction at the Museum of Modern Art in 1951, he ridiculed such artistic ambitions. Through a sequence of interlinked parables he maintained that “abstraction” created a separation that had never existed, with something called “form” on the one hand and “subject matter” on the other. This false division could only cut off art from its vital connections to the larger universe of our experience. He imagined a painting that had started as a still life being labeled “abstraction”:

Until then, Art meant everything that was in it—not what you could take out of it. There was only one thing you could take out of it sometime when you were in the right mood—that abstract and identifiable sensation, the esthetic part—and still leave it where it was. For the painter to come to the “abstract” or the “nothing” he needed many things. Those things were always things in life—a horse, a flower, a milkmaid, the light in a room through a window made of diamond shapes maybe, tables, chairs, and so forth…. At that time, they were not abstract about something which was already abstract. They freed the shapes, the light, the color, the space, by putting them into concrete things in a given situation.

With a linguistic pirouette he reversed the terms: letting the color and shape also be a flower freed it. Now that liberation was being threatened: “You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that subject matter came into existence as something you ought not to have.” For de Kooning these prohibitions were almost literally dehumanizing. He parodied the panel’s topic with a tautology: “If I do paint abstract art, that’s what abstract art means to me. I frankly do not understand the question.”

At that time, the work de Kooning had shown publicly was plausibly en route to Greenberg’s nonrepresentational ideal, but in his studio he was already struggling with his Woman series, an interrogation of the figure in space that he’d never abandoned. The difficulty of expanding a formal language to retain both image and abstraction, depth and flatness, can be tracked by the works on paper as he tirelessly abstracts shapes from images, cycling through minor and major modifications until they are not rid of their pictorial references but seem to accrue ever more.

In the exhibition this process is demonstrated in each gallery, but nowhere more clearly than in the one devoted to the black and white enamel permutations leading into and out of his masterpiece Excavation (1950). Using black Sapolin enamel on repurposed nonabsorptive chart paper (varying between the gridded front and blank back), he laid down an incisive edge with a sign painter’s liner brush, a tool that became almost synonymous with de Kooning. The wet paint was then expertly smeared with a knife away from the line in curved solid shapes, like a shark’s fin. Rapid slashes flicker in and out of recognition: aspects of mountains and highways, windows and architecture, breasts and wheels, the propulsive movement underscored by titles like Itinerant Chapel (1951; see illustration below) and Florida Trailer (1950–1951). In them a shape is made abstract by layering pictorial possibilities rather than stripping them away, so that a single curve can evoke a handful of simultaneous associations tied to specific images and experiences—a hill, a hip—all while maintaining its identity as a line within an overall “abstract” composition.

In the second half of the 1950s and early 1960s de Kooning produced his “heroic” gestural paintings, which became his most influential abstractions: surging all-over compositions that synthesized the light and atmosphere of urban, suburban, and pastoral landscapes, notably those along the highways out to Long Island, where he relocated in 1963. For the rest of his life he pursued this intersection of line, shape, color, and texture, conjuring the optical effect of sunlight on water and sand, melding an often eroticized figure with the surrounding spaces both interior and exterior. The rest of the exhibition dramatizes his ingenious material exploration: mixing pumice with ink to create a mineralized darkness, incorporating additives to create his foamy, fatty oils, warping fixatives by rubbing and erasing to turn lines into faceted planes, and smudging pastels into inexplicable colored mists caught within hazy charcoal armatures.

From one work to the next you see de Kooning pushing his materials and abilities to the limit to learn what else they might do just on the edge of his control. There is the infamous group of drawings from the mid-1960s made with his left hand, or while watching television, or with his eyes closed. (He also molded his sketch-like clay sculptures with his eyes closed, working from touch and memory.) Out of this flurried stream-of-consciousness tumble many of his recurrent motifs but also an unexpected number of crucifixions, bodies stretched on an axis but at a receding angle, like a Rubens altarpiece. Christ on the Cross, like the figure of a woman, is another central subject of painting history, and a surprisingly direct restatement of de Kooning’s lifelong analysis of intersecting organic and geometric lines: the human body fitted within baroque space.

By the end of the 1970s his increasingly dramatic alcoholism became a serious problem, and after being estranged for some two decades, Elaine reentered his domestic life, stabilizing it enough for him to make an astonishing final body of work. Once he was sober in the early 1980s, the paintings began to thin and the compositions to simplify. His earlier drawings were used as scaffolding, transferred to the ground and then painted in sparse complex contours with gently modulated open areas between them, as though suspended in a luminous expanse. One of these untitled canvases from 1985 included in the Chicago exhibition shows a handful of cobalt and black waves and curves that intersect and overlap, like airy distended hieroglyphs. The cold white ground is tenderly amended: lines have been shortened or removed by whiting them out, which leaves a fluttering trace of their having been contemplated and reconsidered; the process, as ever, remains in the fore, visually available and ultimately inexplicable. Outside the studio the artist was exhibiting a dementia-like cognitive decline, which long led many critics to cast aspersions on these works, but their sheer visual intelligence and drop-dead elegance refute any supposed diminishment. If anything, as one of the ultimate examples of “late style,” they are achingly affecting, refined to grace alone.

De Kooning always had a unique relationship with language, as though words were simply another of his artistic materials. Many of his quotations are repeated as truisms to this day: “flesh was the reason oil paint was invented”; “even abstract shapes must have a likeness”; “content…is a glimpse of something, an encounter…like a flash.” Much has been made of the alphabetic letters in some paintings, though letters are simply a subcategory of shape, and of the fluent calligraphy of his brush, though handwriting is merely a subcategory of line. Like de Kooning’s conception of images and art history, both are aimed at expanding the semantic scope of painterly language.

His titles, sometimes suggested by friends, are so consistently evocative that they could only have been chosen by him: Door to the River, Easter Monday, Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point. But more fundamentally, in de Kooning there is an unusual awareness of language as integral to visual form itself. He told the critic David Sylvester in 1960: “The very fact that [Woman I] had a word connected with it—‘figure of a woman’—made it more precise. Perhaps I am more of a novelist than a poet…but I always like the word in painting.”

As Hess described first in “Paints a Picture” and as the entire “Willem de Kooning Drawing” exhibition demonstrates, de Kooning’s process was profoundly dialogic, the painter confronting and confronted by an open field: a mark would be made, then studied at length, a visual call and response by which the painting was constructed through a process of looking and thinking that could not be premeditated or circumvented and that was carried on from one work to the next. This conception still, even unconsciously, undergirds what is meant by “painting” in New York City to this day. In 1981 he described his process as a form of talking: “When the thing starts to talk to me, I know what to do. I’m not always right but I think I know what to do.”

De Kooning’s three published major statements—two lectures transcribed and edited by Elaine and the other excised from a conversation with Sylvester and reconstructed as a monologue—can be understood as extensions of dialogue. They fit comfortably among the many other interviews in which you hear de Kooning’s quickening mind, how he thrives on the unexpected back and forth. As in the action of the drawings, you get the sense of how funny he is. Take the deadpan delivery in Emile de Antonio’s documentary Painters Painting (1972) when de Kooning announces, “I don’t think painters have particularly bright ideas.” The filmmaker asks what they have instead. “I guess their talent is painting things. It’s not such a bright idea for Monet to paint those haystacks, different hours of the day.” A smile grows as he says it, and then he breaks into laughter.

In de Kooning’s stories there are many similarly unexpected reversals, as in the opening salvo of his 1951 discussion of abstraction at MoMA:

The first man who began to speak, whoever he was, must have intended it. For surely it is talking that has put “Art” into painting. Nothing is positive about art except that it is a word. Right from there to here all art became literary. We are not yet living in a world where everything is self-evident. It is very interesting to notice that a lot of people who want to take the talking out of painting, for instance, do nothing else but talk about it. That is not contradiction, however. The art in it is the forever mute part you can talk about forever.

When words like “abstract” or “pure” are put in proximity to paintings, they change how we see them. They are the vehicle by which a formal element becomes recognizable and then legible, and that we can go on talking about it makes it meaningful. Without this atmosphere of talk, there is no art worth having, just as without the specificity of “a horse, a flower, a milkmaid, the light in a room,” there is nothing but circles and squares. Of course pictures depicting people and nameable things can be just as meaningless, as the deluge of contemporary figurative painting has made obvious. If many of today’s formally anemic paintings can be dismissed as “illustrative” or “academic,” this is largely enabled by the language now used to discuss them, which does not rise above description of the subject matter. Something rarely said alongside the continual declaration of a “crisis of criticism” is that it is also a “crisis of art.”

Today’s histrionics around artificial intelligence throw into relief a definition of art so obvious that it remains largely unarticulated: something made by human beings for other human beings to think about, primarily through looking. Such a definition brings back uncomfortable and long-discredited mythologies of the artist, especially those who embody virtuosity as de Kooning does. However, if we accept that art is an inherently human endeavor, then there is no clean way to sever the purely visual experience of an individual painting from everything else humans do—our relationships with friends and lovers, with paintings and books from throughout history, with highways and beaches. The way these stories are threaded through the artworks makes them more interesting, sometimes sadder, more disturbing, or more beautiful than pigment on canvas or paper could otherwise be. All of this is right there on the surface, but it also extends invisibly all around, between people and across time; it is the forever mute part we will talk about forever.