Running on Empty: Willem de Kooning in the Late 1950s

I'm selling my own image now.

—Willem de Kooning, 1959¹

Speaking to critic David Sylvester in 1960, Willem de Kooning described his canvases of the late 1950s, what I will call his "highway paintings," in the following way:

Most of them are landscapes and highways and sensations of that, outside the city—with the feeling of going to the city or coming from it … But I love to go out in a car. I'm crazy about weekend drives, even if I drive in the middle of the week. I'm just crazy about going over the roads and highways.²

Coupling the artist's words with the paintings' titles—such as Montauk Highway [Fig. 1], Merritt Parkway, and Interchange—it is hardly surprising that critics have mentioned these canvases of 1957–1960 alongside the rapidly expanding American highway system.³ De Kooning's phrase "going to the city or coming from it" has led some to posit a transit-based interpretation: the highway paintings represent a space between the urban and the suburban. According to this logic, de Kooning's shift from his claustrophobic, so-called "urban" abstractions of the mid-1950s to the airy style of the highway paintings a few years later mirrors the simultaneous middle-class abandonment of the inner city, a process certainly spurred on by new freeway construction.⁴ De Kooning himself participated in such urban shifts: he spent increasing amounts of time traveling by car between Manhattan and eastern Long Island during the late 1950s and early 1960s, before permanently settling in the Hamptons in 1963.⁵

Fig. 1.

Willem de Kooning, Montauk Highway, 1958, oil and combined media on heavy paper mounted to canvas, 59 × 48 inches. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. © 2010 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image © 2010 Museum Associates / LACMA / Art Resource, NY.

De Kooning's remarks on the "sensations" associated with driving have encouraged a second, more representational, reading of these paintings in relation to highways: landscapes as viewed from a speeding car.⁶ This interpretation provides a figural frame through which to view these canvases; they are landscapes mediated by automotive movement. Viewers can apparently see blurred impressions of grass, water, and sky in the paintings' broad planes of color.⁷

With the art historical paydirt of de Kooning's comments and titles, critics have failed to probe deeper, neglecting the complex interrelation between highway driving, gestural abstraction, and individual subjectivity at the end of the 1950s. I believe that these paintings are not merely illustrative of an American culture in transition, but rather are deeply engaged with its anxieties, triumphs, and contradictions.

Through their address of the seemingly disparate spheres of "action painting" and driving, de Kooning's highway paintings engage both artistic modernism and social modernization, describing how ideologies of the former enabled an expansion of the latter. De Kooning connects these spheres—driving and painting, the spatial and pictorial—through a discourse that coalesces around the dual meanings of the word "sign." First, the paintings embody the logic of the new interstate culture: simplified, standardized road signs of action painting. Second, the highway paintings are a culmination of de Kooning's involvement with semiotic signs: they demonstrate the increasing impossibility of unmediated expression within culture, despite lingering mythologies of authenticity. Ultimately, the duality of these paintings—that they appear as both triumphant and tragic in relation to subjectivity—makes them crucial utterances of this conflicted moment of the late 1950s, a moment when America was on the verge of pop art and postmodernity.⁸

Action Painting and Driving

When Harold Rosenberg coined the term "action painting" in 1952, he had de Kooning's slashing, gestural style in mind.⁹ For the critic, painters should not approach a blank canvas with a preconceived notion of subject matter, but rather use the process of painting itself as a means of expressing the doubts and struggles of the postwar world. From the start, the existential angst of this style was loosely...