Torah uses images of weight to paint a picture of the Israelites in exile in Egypt. They are “pressed down upon,” taskmasters are “put on them,” they are “compelled to serve.” Bent over, they trample straw into the mud to make bricks. A heaviness weighs not only upon their bodies but also upon their spirits. Walls of despair arise, separating them even from one another. Language itself, the power of creation and connection, languishes. For what is the point? Nothing new can happen. There is nowhere to go, no choice to be made.
The Zohar describes this moment as the Exile of the Word, the loss of the capacity to communicate with transformative consequence. The Israelite men in particular succumb to this condition. For them, all there is is work and death. No re-creation, no future.
Midrash hints that it was the women who began to demolish the walls, to create an openness for something other than the daily grind of work without purpose and without end. They teased their husbands, seduced them, whispered sweet words of desire. They got them to turn aside from the death-path and onto the life-path of intimacy, sex, procreation. Towards a future. The women introduced into Israelite life a sense of reverie, a playful relaxation of the daily weight.
Another midrash tells that the Israelites developed a spiritual practice to sustain this hopeful orientation toward one another and toward the future. They engaged in a form of holy sport. They would take time to play with scrolls. These contained stories of God’s love and promise of redemption for them. These sacred messages were not carved into heavy, solid stone by chisel. They were floated onto parchment in wet ink by a feather. The Hebrew word for scroll comes from the verb “to roll.” The image is one of the Israelites rolling between one another these sanctifying scrolls, these playthings, each Shabbat with joy and revival.
Reverie, this rolling, floating, feathering way, this exercise of relaxing one’s rigid grip on life becomes the means for surviving exile and for emerging from it into an expanse of new possibilities. To relax in this holy way opens one up to a rediscovery of oneself and one’s power to create anew.
The Dutch-born artist Willem de Kooning left his native land by stowing away on the British freighter the S.S. Shelley at the age of 22 in 1926. Fascinated by American pop culture, jazz, and Hollywood, de Kooning, hidden in the ship’s engine room, journeyed to the United States. He eventually slipped off the ship and illegally entered America, his land of promise.
De Kooning quickly immersed himself in the rolling, dynamic world of modern art in New York. For half a century modern art had given birth to a variety of movements, all of which shared a common drive: to shed the constraints of materiality, excessive reliance on rationality, and singularity of perspective.
Emergent as the dominant movement during the 1940’s and 50’s was the uniquely American form Abstract Expressionism. De Kooning was at its center. His work Excavation, painted in 1950, was considered a masterpiece of this form and was exhibited in the Venice Biennale that year.
Throughout much of his career de Kooning covered his canvasses with a dense aesthetic. There is a physical quality to these pieces. Thick swirls of paint, almost as if encrusted on the canvass, dominate. De Kooning achieved this result both from a labored technique and from how he created his paints. By substituting heavier safflower oil for linseed oil and mixing in water along with the carcinogen benzine, he produced a muscular paint.
And then something changed. It is hard to say exactly what caused a radical shift in his aesthetic around 1980. About that time de Kooning stopped drinking, which he had done heavily for decades. It appears that he began displaying a form of dementia. For a decade or more his life and his workspace had been a scene of disarray and chaos. And then his wife Elaine, from whom he had been separated for twenty years, agreed to return and help Willem bring order to his affairs and to his studio life.
The paint thinned. The encrustations dissolved. Harshness gave way to softness. Sharp edges were displaced by sinuous excursions of color across expanse of absolute space, which seemed to convey a distinct message of its own. Light poured forth.
De Kooning painted in this new manner for ten years. Then he stopped painting altogether. He died seven years later in 1997. Some new experience, some altered vision is on display in the works he painted during those ten years. Critics sensed that he had let some weight go and had immersed in a form of reverie.
One artist friend turned to de Kooning after looking at his 1980’s paintings and said: “They’re so ethereal. It looks like you died and went to heaven.” “Yes,” replied de Kooning, “that is what I was going for.”
This shedding of aesthetic weight did not produce a canvass less packed with meaning. Quite the opposite. His fellow Abstract Expressionists, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, had insisted to de Kooning that abstraction required removing representation from painting. To which de Kooning, ever suspect of the strictures of any movement ideology, responded: “I will exclude nothing. Instead, I will add more! Especially evidence of the human figure.”
More is present in these sparser paintings. This period of reverie allowed de Kooning to shed the demands of others and to reclaim himself: “I am becoming freer. I feel that I have found myself more, the sense that I have all my strength at my command. I think you can do miracles with what you have if you accept it. I am more certain the way I use paint and the brush.”
De Kooning had always been at odds with other Abstract Expressionists about the value of the human body in painting: “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented!” De Kooning had struggled with how to merge abstraction and figuration. During his final ten years of painting, in this moment of soaring reverie, de Kooning found release in re-embracing one of the masters who had inspired him early on: Henri Matisse. In 1980, he reflected: “Lately, I’ve been thinking that it would be nice to be influenced by Matisse. He’s so lighthearted.”
And so, at a time of physical decline de Kooning shows us on his final canvasses youthful play. Perhaps that return to Matisse’s playfulness and lightheartedness is what is on display in his 1984 painting Untitled XVIII, a surface where abstraction and human figure, the spiritual and the material, meet in happy, redemptive dance.
