"The body of [de Kooning’s] earlier work represents a level of excellence and achievement that is unparalleled in post-war American painting."
—Allan StoneWillem de Kooning’s Event in a Barn, 1947, is a shining example of the artist’s aesthetic excellence in the late 1940s. This painting marks a crucial point in de Kooning’s development when he managed to synthesize Cubist aesthetics with his own expressive painting style. Event in a Barn is filled with gesture and color: rounded pink shapes, thick swathes of yellow-hued green, and glimpses of white. Allan Stone, legendary art dealer and previous owner of Event in a Barn from 1965, called this moment in de Kooning’s career the “liquefication of cubism;” the melting down and recombination of art ideas from the past to create a new modern style.ⁱ

 

Event in a Barn, alongside works such as Pink Angels, c. 1945, Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, and Judgment Day, 1946, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, function as an essential prelude to de Kooning’s series of black and white abstractions, which formed the center of his first solo show, at Egan Gallery in 1948. This show, in turn, garnered him the approval of influential critic Clement Greenberg, and launched de Kooning’s career as a leading Abstract Expressionist.

 

While de Kooning’s pinks and greens perhaps find their inspiration in Pablo Picasso’s portraits of Dora Maar in the 1930s, the geometric black lines of Event in a Barn nod to Picasso’s work of the 1920s and 1930s, as seen in Figure, 1927, Musée National Picasso, and de Kooning’s own sense of line and draftsmanship, as in Pink Angels. With its clearer visual parallel to the “fantastic anatomy” of Picasso’s work, Pink Angels provides an intermediate example of the abstraction de Kooning reaches with Event in a Barn.ⁱⁱ In both paintings, de Kooning sources his abstract shapes from his own drawings of women, which he cut apart, rearranged, and transposed past the point of recognition. In a painting rich with layers, these collaged drawing elements are the ultimate base, a stylistic and physical foundation on which de Kooning builds his abstraction.

 

In the 1940s, painters in the New York School, including de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Arshile Gorky, worked in the artistic shadow of Picasso. Picasso’s fame and aesthetic innovations had a major impact on contemporary painting styles, and the younger New York artists struggled to balance his inspiration with their own methods. Some artists, such as Pollock and Kline, leaned into abstract gestures to break with Picasso. De Kooning, in contrast, sought to combine Picasso’s Cubism with abstract mark-making to create his own, unique style.

 

Using the work of Picasso as his starting point, de Kooning pushed past fragmentation, past figuration, to a point where few recognizable forms could be seen in his paintings. His skilled brushstroke led him towards more fluid, dynamic compositions. Event in a Barn exemplifies the result of this work: the canvas stands as a record of the act, or event, of painting. Even the title of the work references the act.

 

De Kooning worked quickly, with a thick and expressive brushstroke. He built up layers of paint, scraped them away, and painted over them; the older layers show through the gaps in the new. Following the black lines, the viewer can see where de Kooning turned his brush on its thin side, where he pressed it flat and wide. Event in a Barn is also an early example of de Kooning’s incorporation of paint drips, chance incidents of the painting process, to add depth and layers to his compositions. Gestures like these gave Abstract Expressionism the nickname “action painting,” as each painting records the act of painting.

 

 

"[De Kooning’s] subject seems to be the crucial intensity of the creative process itself."
—Renée Arb

Willem de Kooning and Allan Stone

 

In addition to finding wider career success in the late 1940s, de Kooning had a particular impact on a high school student named Allan Stone. Stone saw de Kooning’s work for the first time in 1948, at an Abstract Expressionist exhibition in Andover, Massachusetts. The young Stone was “totally captivated by de Kooning, Gorky, Kline… Pollock. Experiencing their work was probably the closest thing to a religious experience I ever had!”ⁱⁱⁱ

 

Inspired by this 1948 show, Allan Stone grew up to become a legendary Manhattan art dealer and collector. Best known for selling the work of Abstract Expressionist artists, Stone played an essential role in cementing the movement’s place in art history. In 1954, six years after the exhibition in Andover, Stone bought his first artwork: de Kooning’s study for Pink Angels (1945).^iv

 

De Kooning remained a recurring presence at key events in Stone’s life. De Kooning’s wife, the artist Elaine de Kooning, encouraged Stone to open his first gallery in 1960, and whenever the gallery moved to a new space (1962 and 1994), Stone celebrated the occasion with a de Kooning show (Barnett Newman/de Kooning and Liquefying Cubism, respectively). De Kooning’s work from the 1940s set the “aesthetic standard by which we try to run the gallery,” Stone said in 1994.^v For Stone, there was no higher standard for post-war American art than de Kooning. In a collection of thousands of objects, Event in a Barn took pride of place; Stone hung it over the mantelpiece in his home.^vi Willem de Kooning was one of Stone’s greatest inspirations, from childhood through to the end of his life.

 

ⁱ Allan Stone, Liquefying Cubism, New York, 1994, p. iii.
ⁱⁱ Alfred H. Barr, Jr., quoted in Michael Fitzgerald, Picasso and American Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2006, p. 191.
ⁱⁱⁱ Allan Stone, quoted in The Collection of Allan Stone, vol. 1, Sotheby’s, New York, p. 11.
^iv The Collector, 2006, dir. Olympia Stone, at 21:57.
^v Stone, Liquefying Cubism, p. ii.
^vi As seen in The Collector, at 59:00.