For a moment, the crowd that was constantly amassing around the painting singled out by the organizers of the MOMA’s Willem de Kooning retrospective as the masterpiece of his early period—Excavation (1950)—had dispersed. So my husband and I positioned ourselves in front of it to take advantage of what we knew was a rare moment of unobstructed viewing. Excavation is strategically located to be the climactic experience in the room devoted to de Kooning’s “breakthrough” black-on-white enamel and oil paintings, which took letters from the alphabet as their starting point but through acts of concentrated painterly energy became something else—organic shapes, anthropomorphized figures, ambiguous forms, increasingly vibrant, rhythmical, and abstract, which I found thrilling to look at. Excavation, more pale yellowish-white than the black of the other paintings in the room, was de Kooning’s largest work yet—6’9” by 8’4”—and my husband pointed out that he no doubt felt compelled to work on this larger scale, given that it was the moment of the mural-scale paintings of Jackson Pollock et al. Nevertheless, it was still an “easel” painting—the distinction was Clement Greenberg’s—and if de Kooning was after the more experimental overall look and feel of a Pollock, my husband thought this painting fell short. He appreciated the psychic battle apparent in all the strenuous marks of doing and undoing that de Kooning was trying to orchestrate into a unity during the many months he worked on the painting, but the more time we spent looking, the more my husband questioned whether de Kooning’s “talent” was getting in his way: the tasteful dabs of bright color, no matter how many subversive techniques he invented in their application; his masterful line and contour, no matter how violently he worked to dislodge the figure from its own pictorial space; and most telling, his unconscious return to the center of the painting with an “x” to mark the spot, even as he tried to allow for more spontaneous composition. Such was de Kooning’s “talent” that no matter how radically he tried to break with line-bounding shapes, in Excavation, it feels like there is always a ghost of the figure about to reappear.

Pointing to a particularly elegant equivocal line, oscillating between two- and three-dimensional pictorial space, my husband reminded me of how much it shared with the small still life from de Kooning’s student days in Rotterdam that we admired in the first room of the exhibition, Bowl, Pitcher, and Jug (1921). We spent almost as much time before it as we did before Excavation. It was a deceptively simple, elegant drawing, conté crayon and charcoal on paper: I was completely taken with the certitude of the line, the perfection of the volumes, the articulation of the dry, cracking surface of the terra-cotta pitcher, the subtlety of the highlight on the dark, smooth jug. What an eye … Already in his youth, my husband observed, de Kooning was approaching the almost pointillist optics of his great countryman Vermeer. Everything, in retrospect, seemed to be contained in this beautiful little drawing. The simultaneous edge and profile of the jar and pitcher that had made such an impression on us had become the elegant equivocal line that my husband was now pointing out to me in Excavation.

Just as I was asking him if he thought that it was the same line that we saw in the black-on-white enamel paintings where de Kooning had managed to escape the seductions of color, an excited stranger interrupted us: “Brilliant, amazing, he’s incredible!” He told us that he was a painter, that long ago he had been an art student in Chicago, that he stopped and looked at Excavation every day when he walked through the Art Institute of Chicago to get to class. As he looked again at the painting he knew so intimately, he seemed on the verge of transport and wanted us to know what he was seeing. He said it was like looking at ten paintings in one and began pointing to one section of the canvas after another, directing our attention to that little patch of scraped-back orange over there, the blue and red marks at the center, the way the paint stacked up at the bottom edge of the canvas. His enthusiastic desire (bordering on exhortation) for our enthusiastic assent, I immediately gave to him. It reminded me of the time we were at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden on a lovely spring day and a lone garden-lover noticed that we were admiring wisteria in bloom and exclaimed, almost demanded of us, “It’s beautiful!” And also of the same experience with an enthusiastic stranger at the Morandi retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum a few years ago and more recently in front of Courbet’s The Artist’s Studio at the Musée d’Orsay.

After we parted ways with the ecstatic admirer of de Kooning, I reminded my husband of what Kant had said about beauty—that when people say an object is beautiful, they mean that it pleases them personally but also something more binding and objective; that the object that pleases them would also command the same response from anyone who viewed it. And that a part of this pleasure comes from being in the company of others. That is why total strangers want you to say, yes, it is beautiful or, in the case of de Kooning, yes, it is brilliant, amazing, incredible. My husband replied that of course de Kooning was brilliant, inventive. Nevertheless, he kept seeing Picasso or Gorky in de Kooning’s paintings; he thought there was too much composition, too much Cubist space, in comparison with Pollock or Rothko or Newman or Still. Then I remembered from reading Harold Rosenberg a number of years ago that the situation of artists of Rosenberg’s generation was daunting in the extreme, that after the catastrophes following from the two world wars they were convinced that all inherited forms of Western culture had permanently collapsed, that in order to go on, they would have to start from scratch (“start from scratch” was Rosenberg’s expression).

Just as we were about to enter the next room of the exhibition, we ran into an acquaintance of ours, who was writing down his thoughts in a notebook. He told us that going through the show made him wonder whether artists have more freedom, more possibilities for innovation, for experiment, than novelists, that novelists can never fully escape from grammar, from built-in conventions of representation. This surprised me coming from this man, as he is one of the last of our novelists who continues to press the limits of representation in the modernist experimental vein. That is what I told him, and then I expressed my admiration for how far he had gone in one of his novels where we are made to experience what it would feel like for a disembodied being, with vague, phantom memories, to come into consciousness. He said he was glad to hear that and then asked if we had seen the whole exhibition yet; he was making his way through the rooms he liked best for a second time and said that he was astounded by de Kooning’s inventiveness, how he never stood still. We then spoke about how best to make sense of such an enormous oeuvre: chronologically within his own development? In relation to his artistic predecessors and contemporaries? Or in relation to the writing of his contemporary viewers? At that point, my mind went back to something I had read in Rosenberg, that in the late 1940s de Kooning said he and his fellow artists were working on the basis of formal ideas in which they no longer believed.