De Kooning at The Art Institute of Chicago

by Solomon Whitaker

Thoughts after the William de Kooning show at the Art Institute of Chicago

I left the de Kooning show at the Art Institute of Chicago thinking about repeatability. How does an artist repeat a specific urgency, freedom, or looseness? And how do those qualities become concentrated enough to sustain contemplation?

Urgency gives an action necessity: something has to happen. Freedom allows you to follow it without knowing its destination. Looseness leaves room for adjustment, accident, and unexpected relationships. Together, they can get a work moving before you fully understand what you’re doing. Understanding comes through making.

But a compelling event creates a problem: how do you return to it?

You can repeat the outward movement of your hand, yet the movement may no longer have the same necessity. What was a discovery can become a familiar manner. A gesture that once opened possibilities can become a shortcut to a recognizable result.

That makes repeatability an artistic problem as much as a technical achievement. What are we trying to recover—the shape, the intensity, the openness, or the possibility of discovering something again?

Perhaps what becomes repeatable is a way of attending. Familiarity with materials allows you to stay responsive while working freely. Experience helps you recognize a possibility quickly and remain with it. You begin to sense when to follow a mark, when to interrupt it, and when to leave it alone.

Looseness can carry considerable precision. A mark may be irregular while its placement, weight, and relationship to another mark are exact. Its freedom exists within those relationships. Move it slightly, change its thickness, or close the space beside it, and the whole passage may feel different.