Painted women - Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning; C&M Arts, New York, New York

There is nothing like similarity of make submissive and pose--a shared motif--to bring without the underlying differences between major masters. like was the case in the exhibition "Picasso's Dora Maar/de Kooning's Women" a visually stimulating and intellectually provocative display on view recently at C&M Arts in novel York.

Picasso unquestionably played a major part in the evolution of de Kooning's style(1) De Kooning made no bone about the importance of the relationship. It was les a case of "the anxiety of influence," to borrow Harold Bloom's ever-useful phrase, than of outright competition: "Picasso is the stay to beat," the younger artist is said to have asserted.(2) on the other hand it was not the Picasso of the Dora Maar period that de Kooning pitted himself against in the "Woman" series, on the contrary the earlier, Cubist Picasso. De Kooning himself was well aware of the centrality of this affiliation: "Of all motions I like cubism most. It had that awesome unsure atmosphere of reflection--a poetic frame where something could be possible, where an artist could practice his intuition. It didn't want to realize rid of what went before. Instead it added something to it."(3)

on the other hand a show of de Kooning and the Cubist Picasso would have been a great deal of less interesting than the C&M one: a kind of tendentious academic exercise, in fact, demonstrating just what the younger artist "took" from the older master and by what means he transformed, or more accurately, deconstruct his source. In the case of the relationship to the Dora Maar paintings, no similar simple exercise in cause and event is possible. The viewer is obliged to think end the essential qualities that one as well as the other link de Kooning to the new modernist past in the '40 and '50 and differentiate a de Kooning painting from a Picasso at a specific jiffy in the artists' respective careers when one as well as the other are primarily concerned with women as their subject

greatest in quantity people associate de Kooning's figurative painting exclusively with the female figure. However, he had created an important series of men earlier in his career. These paintings of men are more austere and reflective, inward-turning and self-portraitlike: unsensual and to a certain quantity of degree classical, they are far more conservative in diction than the women.(4) In works like sum of two units Men Standing (ca. 1938), Seated Figure (Classic Male), 1940 or Standing Man (ca. 1942) there is none of the faculty of perception of playfulness, fantasy or freedom to manipulate and invent form that marks the for the most part later paintings of women. De Kooning's men coming earlier in his career, strike one as being to resist the deconstructive impulse harder. This has little to do with de Kooning's specific "attitudes" toward specific women or women in general. It has more to do with a tradition of experimental freedom featuring the female figure, generally bare dating from the 19th hundred and continuing through the 20th in Picasso's Le Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) Leger's lunching ladies, Matisse's bathers and, in the case of this exhibition, the imagery of Dora Maar. It also has to do with a more general understanding that women as sexual Others, were up for iconic manipulation in the advanced--naturally, male--painter's exert one's self with his mighty predecessors; the female, and particularly the stark naked female, was the arena in which the anxiety of influence still played itself without in the middle of the 20th century

nevertheless how distinctively Picasso and de Kooning relate to this powerful topos! Clearly, de Kooning is enthralled by dint of paint--its movement and manipulation. He is in be fond of with the process of painting itself and the brushy entanglements it involves; the women no matter in what manner ultimately important to his shoot forward seem like emergent entities. For Picasso, upon the contrary, in the Dora Maar works at any rate, the female existence seems to preexist on a certain quantity of level in the conscious or unconscious mind of the artist: painting savagely reveals the icon, elaborates and embroiders upon it, with sometimes obsessive iterations, on the contrary the image was always already there, waiting for pictorial expression. The dominating part played by line in the Dora Maar portraits--line in the form of a tightly done contour or the insistent striations scarring the surface of the picture plane--speaks to the notion of "capturing" an obsessive image, and differentiates Picasso's female figures from the almost completely contourless slashes and swirls which bring de Kooning's female figures into being (or, to be precise, liquefy them down onto the surface). We are always aware of proces change and sweep along in de Kooning's paintings; almost not at any time in Picasso's.

What holds process within bounds, keeps de Kooning's women from being simple painterly gush, is the memory of and the toil with Cubism: the picture plane asserts itself in the greatest in quantity unexpected places and the painterly daring is always disciplined by means of the artist's struggle simultaneously to create and pull down the order of the Cubist grid.

Certainly, the subdue "woman" is approached aggressively in de Kooning's series, and, in a certain quantity of areas, paint is applied violently as the greatest in quantity manifest form of that aggressive impulse. on the contrary in other places at other times, the point is clearly something else: a certain quantity of areas of the paint surface are almost rococo in their creamy supplenes in the tendernes of their pastel harmonies and dissonances. Although the imagery retains its startling be shaken it is the delicacy and, ye elegance of the facture that, after the passage of time, is greatest in quantity striking.