Johan & Levi: Biografie

Described by André Breton as the most intelligent man of the 20th century, Marcel Duchamp has never ceased to wield great influence over contemporary art since his death in 1968. From Dada and Surrealism to Futurism and Cubism, his art is interwoven with the great artistic movements of the 20th century without ever being reducible to any one of them. If Picasso insistently presents the figure of the artist as demiurge, Duchamp personifies the contemporary artist through his invention of the ready-made and has been recognized since the 1960s as an undisputable source of inspiration by younger generations of artists. A great deal has been written about his work but far less about his life, which he led outside the current categories, not as an artist or anarchist but as an “anartist”, to use his own neologism. Detachment, elegance, the freedom of indifference and interpenetration of opposites as well as a constant assertion of laziness and physiological disdain for money were for him the original tools of an unprecedented stance with respect to the world and things: “I prefer living and breathing to working.” Duchamp’s frequent, caustic remarks on his life serve as a whole to delineate a personal economics (reduce needs in order to be truly free) and an authentic art of living. According to Henri-Pierre Roché, Duchamp’s finest work was his use of his time. Bernard Marcadé takes this view as his starting point in the deep conviction that detailed examination of the artist’s life will provide the best understanding of his art. By describing the ready-made as a sort of appointment, Duchamp himself suggests the importance of the events of everyday life in the conception of his works. The biographical elements in play – meetings, friendships, secrets, correspondence and love affairs – are not only anecdotal and marginal trimmings of the work but “biographemes” constituting its fundamental components.

One of the most innovative and influential artists of his generation, Robert Rauschenberg (Port Arthur, 1925 – Captiva Island, 2008), is a key figure in the radical upheavals that American visual art went through as from the late 1950s during the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Born in Texas and part Cherokee on his mother’s side, Rauschenberg daringly challenged all assumptions on taking his first steps in the art world. From his first stay in Paris, the formative experience at Black Mountain College under the guidance of Joseph Albers and his trip to Rome with Cy Twombly to his friendship with John Cage and Merce Cunningham and recognition at the international level with the award of the Golden Lion at the 1964 Venice Biennial, his art developed off the beaten track in the field of experimentation that breaks all the rules, transforming the two-dimensional space of the painting into a receptacle for heterogeneous materials. Newspaper cuttings, pieces of fabric, photographs and found objects, nothing was excluded from his Combine paintings, hybrid creations halfway between painting and sculpture, which combine a love for discarded objects inherited from Dadaist collage with abstract-Art Informel brushwork. Calvin Tomkins offers us extraordinary insight into the revolution whereby art emerged from the museums and galleries to occupy the centre of the social stage. He presents its leading figures: the old guard of Pollock and de Kooning and the new generation of Jasper Johns, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol alongside art dealers and gallery owners like Betty Parsons, Leo Castelli and the collector and patron Peggy Guggenheim. He documents the rise to the pinnacle of success of the artist who aimed more than any other in this context at a cumulative art, the irrepressible innovator who stated his desire to create a situation in which there was as much space for the viewer as the artist.

Born in Rotterdam in 1904, Willem de Kooning moved to the United States in 1926. Together with Gorky, Pollock, Rothko and Kline, he was one of the leading pioneers of Abstract Expressionism, which marked New York’s replacement of Paris as the world’s capital of art. De Kooning lived the longest of that group of painters and produced the most, continuing to create surprisingly daring images into the 1980s. Active in a variety of genres including figure painting, the female nude and landscapes verging on complete abstraction, he developed many different styles, each deeply personal and at the same reflecting movements of great importance in 20th-century American culture. De Kooning’s life, from embarking as a stowaway to the attainment of celebrity, repeats the classic American myth of the emigrant who crosses the ocean in search of a better life and experiences poverty, failure and success first-hand. On the basis of a decade of research including hundreds of interviews and a series of previously unpublished letters and documents, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swann offer the first major biography of this complex and romantic figure. De Kooning. L’uomo, l’artista is a living and richly detailed portrait and reconstruction of the painter’s life from the difficult years of poverty, instability and often violent family life in Rotterdam, the scene of his academic training and initial employment in decorative art, to his arrival in the United States, where he fought doggedly to establish himself as an American artist during the Depression. His early years in the United States are marked by the influence of Gorky, another immigrant, who was not only his mentor but also the role model who inspired his willingness to sacrifice everything to art. It was not until 1948 that his first solo show at the Egan Gallery revealed his talent to critics like Rosenberg and Hess, who vied with one another to champion his work and recognized him as a charismatic leader of the New York School, which was just beginning to make an international impact. His stormy marriage to Elaine Fried, another renowned figure in the world of art, reached its crisis in the late 1940s and early ’50s. At the peak of his fame, de Kooning was caught up in a self-destructive spiral to the point of personifying the new American myth of the man destroyed by his own success. He spent his days painting powerful abstract works and provocative female figures, and his nights haunting the Cedar Tavern, talking to friends like Franz Kline and Frank O’Hara, womanizing, drinking and roaming the streets. In the 1960s, worn out by the feverish world of art and nearly destroyed by success, he retreated to the Springs on Long Island, where he painted an extraordinary series of lush pastorals followed by a vast body of haunting, ethereal late work. Until the end, afflicted by senile dementia, de Kooning remained the painter he had always been, spending the day in front of the canvas and never hesitating to destroy his creations in order to renew a constantly shifting style in accordance with his conviction that you have to change in order to stay the same.