The Museum of Modern Art's "de Kooning: A Retrospective" is a mammoth rethinking of Willem de Kooning oeuvre and career, and as such is the latest master class in curation by John Elderfield, the museum's chief curator emeritus of sculpture andpainting. ARTINFO spoke to the art historian — whose previous thought-provoking blockbusters range from last year's "Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917" to a major Kurt Schwitters retrospective in 1983 — about the development of de Kooning's art, what people get wrong about his work, and what it's like to be a curator in the age of Google and YouTube. 

Looking at the chronological gallery layout of the exhibition at MoMA, it seems like one of the major motivations behind the retrospective was to reassess the progression of de Kooning’s career, and how his art changed over time. Do you want viewers to leave the show thinking about de Kooning in a new way?

I think that while, for many people, de Kooning is known as one of the great artists of that generation, I think that the sense of who he was as an artist is somewhat less known. He is known clearly for "Woman I" and for "Excavation," but, in terms of the kind of knowledge of his career, I think there are a lot of people who are less aware. And, whereas, with a Pollock or a Rothko, you see a development of a signature style which more or less remains intact, and is kind of easier to get a hold on. Whereas with de Kooning, who effectively develops a whole sequence of signature styles, it's much harder.

There hasn't been a de Kooning retrospective since the early '80s at the Whitney, and of course he was still active as an artist. And also, it was a show that, as meritorious as it was, nevertheless did miss some really critical pictures, including "Woman I" and "Excavation," which, for reasons I quite can't fathom, weren't there. Since then, there was in the '90s a kind of summary show, which the National Gallery did and which came to the Met, of about 80 paintings. It was wonderful, but not enough to actually describe the career. And I don't think his career — terms of the artistic practice, how one thing led to the next — can be described with large canvases. You need the smaller works; you need some drawings and sculpture and whatever else. So it's been a long time, really, since that's been possible. And if you kind of think, "well, maybe the Whitney show didn’t really have that," then you go way back to the show that was at MoMA in 1969! So, you know, certainly, its time was due.

And you were able to gather all of the major pieces. You said there were over 100 different lenders contributing works to the show?

Yeah. When I started this about six years ago, of course I came to it as someone who had been an admirer of de Kooning's work and had seen a lot of exhibitions. I wasn't in New York in time to see the 1969 show, but I've seen the Whitney show and, of course, the National Gallery and Met show. There have been smaller shows around the world, too, and I've made it my job, because I admire his work, to see as much as I can.

So I came with a sense of what was important. And I actually began by just sitting down and making a list for myself out of my head, actually, of, "okay, what do you have to have to get this to work?" And then I went and talked to the people who owned them. And most of them said they wouldn't lend because they said, "you're never going to do this," and I said, "well... if I did do it, would you lend?" And its usually something where people say, "come back and talk to me another day." And so it came slowly out of the gate.

In this period, I was also working on the "Matisse: Radical Invention" show, which opened a year ago, so there was a period there when there were two trains kind of going at full speed on parallel tracks, which is a little hairy. But once that show opened in Chicago, it really cleared the way to push ahead to work on de Kooning for the last two years, and to work on the catalogue, and just keep going with lenders. People were very, very supportive. And the Met, the Hirshhorn, both of them have nine works each I think, but then a lot of other places and quite a number of private collectors who have three, four, five pictures were supportive too. And it's a lot to ask people to take off their walls. When people have one great picture, it's a lot. But I've obviously been doing this for a long time, so I kind of know how you do it. [laughs]

You know how to convince people.

Yeah. But still, if I was on the other end of this, and if I had these works and some guy came to me and said, "How about it?" I would really want to know what the context was and really feel that this was going to be something that really made a difference. And I really respect that. And once they understood, it was great. You know, it was a lot of work, of course, to get everybody on board. And some cases were really easy. I've worked with a number of these collectors before on shows of other artists where I've been to see them, and so they've seen my earlier shows, and they know I'm not going to screw up too badly.

At the exhibition preview, you were talking about how we don't really know how de Kooning's work progressed because we can never see his whole career at once. What are the misconceptions we have about his work and his ideas as a result?

Well, I think one is the whole issue of abstraction and representation. One often reads that he alternated between making abstract pictures and making representational pictures. And it really isn't true. I mean, it's rarely true. Most of the time, he made them at the same time. And once one understands that he made them at the same time, you inevitably think, where actually are the boundaries between the two things? Is there some kind of fixed thing called a representational picture and some fixed thing called an abstract picture, or are they on a gradient? And some things that kind of look abstract have components in them which are representational. You recognize units that de Kooning has represented, even if you can't identify them. And in some cases, you kind of have a shot at identifying them — like with "Summer Couch," you think, well, that must be a couch, but you hesitate to call it a representational picture, as opposed to the "Woman" paintings. And I did think for a while of alternating the pictures.

Alternating them between abstract and representational?

Yeah. But it seemed to me that there is enough separation, that the woman paintings have a sequentiality, and it's important to see them together. And you can look across the room, and see that these dislocated arms in the wound pictures are actually just like that couch. Tom Hess, who was a friend of the artist, and did that 1969 show, said that, it's as if forms from one kind of picture inhabit other kinds of pictures. And I think there is that sense that there are things that take residence in different places. In one context, it can be an arm, and in another context, it can be a couch, and in another context, you're really not sure what it is. And in this particular example, you can jump to the black-and-white pictures, which really look abstract, and then see, yeah, that's actually that couch that is in one of these other pictures. Without the knowledge of the other ones, you wouldn't know what it was and where it came from. And even de Kooning himself said that you can't look at pictures alone, you've got to look at them in the whole context of the artist's life and what he does.

And De Kooning himself didn't like the whole Abstract Expressionist label.

No, no. He kind of accepted it because he said, "you're with a group whether you like it or not." But he didn't like it and, in fact, it's like one of those art history labels where you'll use it without actually thinking about what it means. Does it mean expressing yourself in abstract means? And when you put it like that, it seems almost as dumb as Cubism being just about cubes. Neither is true, but it's just a kind of label. I forget who, someone, who called it "painterly abstraction," which is kind of closer to it, except that it isn't all abstract. You know, it's kind of freely-inventive-abstract-and quasi-abstract-made-in-mid-century-America art. [laughs]

That’s not quite as catchy as Abstract Expressionism.

I know, I know. That wouldn't go down. 

De Kooning's work always seems to have the idea of the figure and representational vocabulary behind it. When you were talking about his late work, you mentioned that there might be a motif of high heels running through them part of the iconography.

Yeah, there is a point, really by the '70s, where you go "Okay, he's now fully into abstraction." I'm thinking of that big gallery at the back that has the sculpture there. And one reason I wanted the sculpture there is to show that these works, which are putatively abstract paintings, are nonetheless representational paintings in the same way as when you look at the sculptures you see these kind of weird sluggy surfaces. Looking at them close up, it's very much like what's going on in the paintings.

If you plant yourself in front of some of these paintings, you do start to see high heels, body parts, this kind of big "M" crotch symbol, which he uses a lot, and realize that, even if you don't know — which we do know — that these began as figurative compositions that he traced onto the canvas and then painted on the figurative imagery. I think that if one wasn't aware of that, these images do start to appear and dissolve back into the surface, at times. And I mentioned the high heels. There's this one picture, "The Predictor," which hangs next to the sculptures, where on the bottom left corner there's something which really does look like high heels. And, you know, he was interested high heels.    

In the early rooms in the show, you see him mining an iconography of secretaries and typewriters. That actually really surprised me, I had no idea he used such Pop-ish references to the real world and real life. 

Yeah, that to me was one of the real discoveries of the show. Initially I'd seen these works reproduced in early catalogues. Works like this weren't in the Met show because they weren't big or commanding enough, but I've always sort of been intrigued by them. There's something kind of weird and wonderful about them. Clearly he's still working through and coming from a [Joan] Miró-grotesque type of thing and sliding into something else, and this seemed a really pivotal thing. The kind of summative pictures of the group, like "Mailbox," which was in his first solo show in 1948, were beyond that and are fully developed pictures, but there's a group of these others which are really very strange and I think very beautiful, and they're not easily seen. Of the ones on that wall, one is in the Minneapolis Institute of Art, one is in Cincinnati, one is in a private collection in New York, another is in a private collection in Pittsburg.  

This group seemed to me to deal most clearly with a kind of narrative. And then I tried to find out what was going on, and, one thing that really got me going was the Cincinnati picture called "Carol Lombard," and then thinking, what has this got to do with film stars? I was thinking that this strange, Casper the Ghost-like figure is also a kind of voluptuous woman, and realizing — such are the wonders of Google — that Casper first made his appearance in 1945. You know, he was known as "the ghost with a New York accent." I thought, this is the kind of thing that de Kooning's mind would like. And then, I thought, well, what about secretaries? And I Googled "secretary 1947" and there were these instructional films, which are on YouTube, with these hilarious titles like "How to Supervise Your Women Workers" and particularly the one called "A Secretary," which is great.

There's this one section where it says, "one important this is that a secretary has got to maintain her boss's calendar," and then she's there with one of those ring-back calendars, and I was like, "That's what it is in the picture!" In the wide world of things this is kind of small potatoes, but it's one of pleasures of doing research. You're kind of like, "Yeah! So that's what happening in these pictures." And I think that with the real important transitional point, immediately before the pictures he showed in his first solo show, one gets the sense of what kind of intensity and mixture of sources go into the more classically refined pictures. Even when he looks classically abstract, this is what's coming from his mind to his arm as he's making these pictures.

At the time de Kooning created his late work, the paintings were widely praised and accepted. How has that perception changed over time?

There were exhibitions of the ones from the early '80s, and the general reaction was delight and also surprise that de Kooning had changed so much. And I think that a lot of people had come to feel that the very loose, painterly pictures of the '70s were kind of the great style of old age. People were comparing him to late Titian, who had sort of a similar style, so this was a great shock that [de Kooning's] late work wasn't going to be like Titian — it was going to be like Matisse. But I think people accepted this and realized these things were extraordinary. When things changed was really a the end of the '80s, after Elaine de Kooning had reappeared in her husband's life at the end of the '70s and was responsible for getting him off booze and setting up his studio in a professional way. She did him a great, great service in both respects. He had very good studio assistants, good materials, and it was working well.

But after she died, it was clear that by this point in '89 that his dementia, whatever it was — and we don’t know that it was Alzheimer's, it could have been another related thing, it could have been a result of all those years with booze, no one really quite knows what it was — but in any event, he was really incapable of managing his own affairs, and so they petitioned to effectively have ownership of the affairs, and once that became public there was sort of this back-projection of "well, obviously this guy wasn't competent," and, "what were the studio assistants doing?" Some of the press around the National Gallery show in the mid '90s, both in New York and in London, was really nasty and comes from absolutely uninformed opinion, just working from rumor and saying, "obviously the studio assistants painted these pictures; obviously he wasn't capable of doing it." When I was working on the show, I had people whose opinions in art I otherwise really respect who would say shocking things to me, which just weren't true. And I would say, "You're wrong," and they would say, "of course we're not wrong, everybody knows this," and I would say, "everybody doesn't know that!"

I think the show of late work that Gary Garrels and Rob Storr did really pretty much set the record straight. They did good research, and that catalogue really answers all those charges about what the studio assistants did, and what he did, and so on. I think it's very clear. Similarly, the biography by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan is pretty clear on this, although they have some problems with some of the later pictures, which I don't. I feel that, certainly through 1987, the pictures in the show suggest that he was almost certainly operating on cognitive reserve, which we know is how people can operate. Pianists and violinists and so on, who have had long, distinguished careers can be incapable in daily life but can continue to perform at precisely the same level. And I think this was true of de Kooning. One of the things that I felt was important about this show was that we would see the late work in the context of the whole career. When you see it and how it comes out as an intensification and clarification of what was going on through the '70s, I think it absolutely fits. And there's also some of the spareness of the very early work.

You mean that the paintings fit within the whole trajectory of de Kooning's career, as opposed to seeing the late paintings only within the context of that one decade of output?

Yeah. I think it's important that that had to be done, and, knowing the controversies surrounding these works, I made it my job to see a lot of them. I think [de Kooning] maybe got 300 works done in that period, and I certainly saw 200 of them. I felt that it was really important to know where he was coming from. And not all of them, by any means, are at the level of the 13 in the exhibition, but I could have easily had another different 13 that could have done it. So, you know, I think it's kind of a great ending; it's actually kind of poignant that the traces of revision and the subjectivity in the early work is gradually evacuated from the late work into this pure, ethereal state. And I think it's amazing, the sense of somebody whose sense of self is gradually drifting away is able to make this record of what's happening. They are some extraordinarily beautiful paintings.

The final gallery looks like a crescendo for the entire show. The room just kind of explodes.

Yeah.

Recently there has been a movement toward reconsidering artists' late work, with such shows as the late Picasso and late Rauschenberg surveys at Gagosian, and the late Dali and late Renoir museum exhibitions. What do you make of this trend?

Well, I think it's a good thing. I've always enjoyed looking at less-typical work. I would also like to see a reconsideration of early work as well. I was involved in a big Mondrian show a little white ago, but actually I love the early Mondrians. I love the landscapes — I would like to see those seen. And I would like to see, on the other side, a late Pollock show. Because I think that one sees Pollock as a crescendo leading to the great all-over pictures, and the black-and-white works. But after that, people begin to feel, well, he then kind of retreated into figuration. But de Kooning's lesson is that, yeah, well, maybe Pollock retreated, or maybe he moved into figuration because he saw what de Kooning was doing and thought, "oh, you can still make pictures with figural imagery." And I would like to see those pictures brought together.

But, you know, the mythos of late work has been that that it has withered for a bit, and I think that really was a 19th century kind of Romantic concern in the first place — in the context of Romanticism, people asking, what happens at the end of artists' careers? Do they have some kind of illumination that they couldn't have before? So it's sort of taking over again, and I think that kind of rises periodically. Certainly the late work of Picasso has been very successfully reexamined and brought to light. The big 1980 show that [late MoMA curator] Bill Rubin did, which was a great, great show, nonetheless gave very summary attention to the late work, and, we now know, there's a lot of great interest there.

I wanted to ask about the one wall where you have all of the 1950s "Women" series paintings hanging in a row. It's such a powerful statement, and it brought to mind the installation of Matisse's "Backs" relief series in your 2010 "Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917" exhibition.

[laughs] Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. I think this is kind of a classic modernist thing, which he kind of attached to: the idea of making big figure pictures where the image and the shape of the work are somehow coterminous. You have the sense that the figure designs the picture, and the picture designs the figure.

They're all one unit.

Yeah, and I think it's an amazingly powerful thing. And I think you're right. It is a like seeing the Matisse backs, in a sequence of one thing, then the next thing. The same subject, unfolding over different realizations of it. And, in the installation of the show, which took a long time because it's a lot of work. Because of the value and importance of these works, they don't just all arrive at the same time and you can just hang them; they come one by one with couriers and so on, so the installation begins as all brown cardboard. And then, that gets replaced with the pictures as they come in. And that wall was the last one to be completed. And it was just waiting for one last work, and, when it came — the power of it increased as each one went up — but when it all was together.... Clearly, our reaction to it is so different to what it was in the 1953, when there were all these screams about misogyny and so on, which I think now just seem to be so beside the point. But I think that what you still get is the kind of amazing intensity of it. And someone I was talking to, we were talking about the misogyny thing, we said actually it's the other way around. You get a sense as a man standing in front of this picture that every bit of paint he put on made these women more and more powerful. And you start to back away. [laughs]

They're so monumental and intimidating.

Yes, and the kind of intensity you can get from paint! It's quite extraordinary. They're certainly more frightening than any woman I've met. He found a way of how to make paintings intimidating. It's certainly extraordinary. I think the ultimate model was, of course, the "Demoiselles d'Avignon," which was also received as a frightening painting. And de Kooning had obviously been struggling with Picasso as the guy to beat for a long time. But I've stood in front of those pictures and walked downstairs to look at the "Demoiselles," which, you know, is a great, great painting, but it doesn't now seem to have quite that same in-your-face intensity that the de Kooning "Women" do when seen as a group. I really wanted five pictures of women on that wall together, because there are five "Demoiselles" downstairs; so you could actually think of this as his version of the five "Demoiselles."

I was reading Carol Vogel's piece in the New York Times about the de Kooning show. She said that you used Google to find books from the era for reference, and you were talking about using YouTube to look at secretary videos. You've worked as a curator for a long time — how do you see the whole process changing with the advent of the Internet?

Well, I was kind of slow to this. I used to write everything by hand. I never used a typewriter, and it got to the point where everyone was groaning. Like, can you at least send in typed manuscripts, or whatever. And I figured that I just had to change. So I kind of jumped over the mechanical age into the electronic one. And it was great. I think it's also a little dangerous. I've seen a lot of computer writing, which badly, badly needs editing. And if you have to write it out by hand each time, you really pay attention to what you're doing. On the other hand, the cut-and-paste possibilities are so great. As for research, I never really had done it that way.

I've also had the benefit at MoMA of having all these great researchers to work with me on my projects. And in this case, I have three wonderful women who did research and also wrote for the catalogue. But I remember at one point, I was working at home and I kind of got stuck on something and I called Laura, who was the chief person, and I said, "Laura, can you find time to go to the library and check this thing for me?" And she said, "hang on," and she gave me the answer! And I said, "How did you do that?" And she said, "John, it's called Google." So, that transformed my life. I'm not the most adept person at it, but I use it a lot. You realize that you have to be careful. The things which are purely factual, things like these early films, you know you’re in safe territory because that's what you’re seeing, but it's the kind of narrative accounts, including Wikipedia, where at times you think you have to go back and look at this and check.

In the end, it's somebody else's writing. And that's what we've been doing. Over these years, when I worked mostly at home. Before the installation started when I was there all the time, I would go in one day a week, and there was a de Kooning section in MoMA's painting and sculpture department where all of our files were and we had albums of 1,000 images of his work and we had everything that had been published into binders. So in a way a lot of the research stuff just has to go on. Because you also find that when people do electronic captures and present it, often it isn’t actually correct. You know, they’ve forgotten to do the last page. [laughs] So you really just have to go back to the sources and with interviews, you have to find a way back to the original transcripts. In some cases, back to the actual recordings. And it’s a massively time-consuming project, but it's hugely rewarding. Perhaps I can more easily say this now, now that I’m not actually a MoMA employee, but do things for exhibitions as an outside person. But MoMA has always been great about putting the resources into that part of exhibition making.

The museum really supports all of the research and the fact-finding.

Yeah the research part. It's not a matter of just collecting a bunch of pictures and hanging them on a wall. It's about really trying to get into the artist's psyche and get into the development of the work, and understanding the sources, understanding the context, understanding what the critical reception was. All of these things are really important. With any of my projects, when you dig in deeply, you find that the work hasn't been done. And you go back to the original checklists of exhibitions, and you find that over time the titles of pictures have changed because those people have mistranscribed them. And sometimes they'll settled into history, so you don't want to change them back.

But for example "Merritt Parkway," that great picture from the late '50s, it has always kind of puzzled me. De Kooning was always talking about taking drives and seeing imagery around him, and here's Meritt Parkway. And it just sort of bugged me that actually he was driving from New York to Long Island, and Meritt Parkway is in Connecticut. So I thought, well, maybe he took trips to Connecticut or something and that’s what this was about. And after a lot of effort, we finally unearthed the checklist of the 1959 exhibition in the archives of the Jonas Gallery, and it was called, "Merrick Parkway." And Merrick, of course, is a town in Long Island! Its little things like this where you say, okay, so now we know.

And that's really what the curating process entails, pinning all of the facts down and being sure about every detail.

Individually none of these things are all that important, but cumulatively they build up and they actually shape an understanding. And I think that that needs to go along with everything else. The reason that "Woman I" is in the middle of that wall is not only that it’s maybe the most commanding one, but actually because it was finished third, and that's why it's in position number three. It was finished third, and that fact was worked out in the research and development of the show. So it's been great fun.

Take a virtual tour of John Elderfield's "de Kooning: A Retrospective" at the Museum of Modern Art in ARTINFO's photo essay.The exhibition is open through January 9, 2012.