Attic by Willem De Kooning

Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam, Holland, and left school at the age of sixteen to work as an
apprentice with a firm of commercial artists and decorators. He moved to New York in 1926 and got his
first job as a house painter. De Kooning engaged himself in the New York art scene by sharing a studio
with artist Arshile Gorky. Along with Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, he established a very distinctive
style that is distinguished by his "allover" approach to composition and his thick, vigorous application of
paint.

De Kooning always strayed from most of the Abstract Expressionism, despite being a leader of the
movement alongside Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, in his inability to entirely renounce
representation—as evidenced by his extensive series of Women and, subsequently, Clam Diggers. De
Kooning created a sequence of extremely abstract black-and-white paintings between 1946 and 1949,
culminating in Attic, in which angular, thrusting elements meet with organic, curved patterns to produce
a high-pitched, emotional picture. The thick web of white shapes and black lines makes it difficult to
discern relationships between form and space, yet a figural basis for the image can still be determined.
Biomorphic symbols and figures are strewn across the painting, alluding to the curves and contours of
human structure.

When we look at the canvas, we notice a palette of black and white, with touches of red and yellow.
There are no representational images, but instead we are introduced to this black and white, like
drawing with charcoal, except the two colors, red and yellow at the bottom. We also see that the paint
is made up of lines that merge together to form shapes of all kinds, both curved and straight, that draw
the attention of the viewer to follow these lines. Following the line down, we notice only 2 colors on the
canvas, red and yellow.

Looking at the painting, it feels like you are watching it in the process of completion as if the painter
stopped working on it to show us his work in progress. This is because the forms are indefinite, they are
not geometric nor are they organic. By looking at it, you can tell he uses a method called “gesture
painting”. This method of painting is characterized by energetic, expressive brushstrokes deliberately
emphasizing the sweep of the painter's arm or movement of the hand.

As you follow the lines and shapes with your eyes, some of these lines begin to morph into certain
animal parts, faces, skulls, and fragments of body parts all over the place. For example, if you pay
attention to the center left, you can notice a form thats kinda like a rhino. Looking a little above that,
you can see forms that look like a skull and fish, right beside each other. This is really to “excavation”.
That is because both “Excavation” and “Attic” are painted by De Kooning. After these images start to
appear, the title of the canvas makes sense, like an actual attic, you store all kinds of different things into
it, this definition ties into what De Kooning did in his painting, a canvas full of lines and shapes, but also
fragments of the body and animal parts all in the same place.