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De Kooning, however, was inherently a corporeal artist. His best work had a wonderful libidinousness, a way of using the body of paint to access and encompass the body of the world. To call it abstract, even when it was most so, is to ignore this. In what was probably his finest painting, Excavation, 1950, one sees desire at full stretch: every form carries its physical freight--elbow, groin, folded belly, thigh, slipping and jostling in the paint as though mud wrestling in pigment. De Kooning could find metaphors of energy that none of his contemporaries could rival. And when he carried his "impurity" beyond the decorum of abstraction, as in the great women of the early to mid-'50s, he produced some extraordinarily intense images--funny, monstrous and laden with anxiety, rendered with a kind of desperate verve. "I find I can paint pretty young girls," he remarked, "yet when it is finished I always find they are not there, only their mothers"--more likely his own mother Cornelia, that coarse dockland sibyl.
It would be hard to pretend that de Kooning's output in the '60s and '70s, after he moved to East Hampton, on Long Island, measured up to the qualities of this earlier work, although his reputation by then had grown to near mythic proportions. (So did his prices: in 1989, just before the great art-market bubble burst, $20.1 million was paid at auction for a 1955 painting, Interchange.) De Kooning was a tough bird, but no talent could have been unaffected by the scale of his alcoholic bouts, and the suds-and-mayonnaise color and scatty marking of his later work are in sharp contrast to the fierce, free concision of the earlier. Most problematic of all, naturally, are the paintings--currently on view at New York City's Museum of Modern Art--that were done in the '80s, after his mind was completely gone and he had to rely on assistants to do everything but move his arm across the canvas. These spectral, vacuous confections of ribbony paint are among the saddest things ever made by a once major artist.
Still, not even they can detract from the brilliant achievements of de Kooning's earlier years. An American Picasso? Surely not. But there was no European de Kooning either.