T. J. Clark's Extraordinary "V is for Vagina"

Willem de Kooning, Suburb in Havana (1958)

I just want to spotlight an extraordinary art review in this month’s London Review of Books – T. J. Clark’s "V is for Vagina." It’s a consideration of Willem de Kooning’s 1958 Suburb in Havana. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a more granular description of a painting, even by Clark, than this one. Clark analyzes it stroke by stroke. Here’s a sample:

Physical description first. I warn you I shall probably try your patience for the next page or so; but I think that the only way to de Kooning’s intention, which is where I want to end up, is by way of process – by trying to reconstruct the sequence of marks in the case, so as to arrive at an intuition of what the sequence may have been aiming for. I believe Suburb in Havana originally had an off-white ground, maybe with a bit of yellow already worked into it. The big blank area going up from the bottom left corner looks to me like a survival from this first stage. The paint hereabouts is thin enough in places for the canvas grain to show through. Yellow seems to have been the first colour put over the off-white ground – certainly that’s true of the yellow in the picture’s lower reaches. There are several streaks and dollops of blue paint on top of the yellow, which seemingly landed when the yellow was half dry. Obviously de Kooning did not proceed from yellow to blue without looking back. If you focus on the areas where the two colours meet, particularly the painting’s horizon line and the broad yellow scrawl just underneath it, you see straightaway that the blue and yellow were applied alternately – the yellow scrawl has pulled up some blue within it and the horizon line of yellow is transparent to the blue underneath. It looks like the sliver of yellow at the picture’s top right corner was added on top of the blue, though it is hard to say what is going on in this area with any certainty. Clearly, to return to firmer ground, the great vertical stroke of yellow to the left was put down when the blue was already there. You can see spatters of yellow falling across the blue field from the first thick clot of colour at the stroke’s top right. The yellow turns green, quite dramatically, in among the rust brown at the top left corner, and once you notice this, you begin to register how much ‘yellow plus blue equals green’ is happening locally elsewhere, all around the yellow vertical and across the transverse yellow scrawling. This is painting in the wet – it is meant to look liquid, and the paint detail tells you that the look is true to the facts.

Clark continues in this vein for several more paragraphs. His review is a tour de force of descriptive analysis. He concludes that Suburb in Havana intends its viewer to focus on the dramatic difference between wet paint and dry: “The yellow scrawl is meant to look liquid: liquidity is bound up with fluency and therefore speed. The dirty brown slash, by contrast, is meant to look as dry as they come – obdurately dry, like old faecal matter.” Yes, you read that last part correctly. Clark is comparing the brown slash to something you might see in a lavatory: “A vagina put up on a dirty yellow wall with something that looks like faeces.” This does not appear to be a favorable view. Yet, Clark, ever the foxy dialectician, also describes de Kooning’s picture as “beautiful, colourful, internally coherent.” It’s an astonishing review. Highly recommended. 

June 30, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Vince Aletti, in his mini-review of “Constellation,” a Diane Arbus exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory, describes Arbus’s work as “tough, provocative, and brilliantly dark.” I agree. He also says that Arbus “isn’t easy to love.” This is also true. Aletti’s note reminded me of Susan Sontag’s great essay on Arbus – “Freak Show” [The New York Review of Books, November 15, 1973; included in her brilliant On Photography (1977) under the title “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly”]. It contains one of my favorite Sontag sentences: “Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.”

2. Hilton Als’ “Goings On” review of Gagosian Gallery’s “Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting” is illustrated with a reproduction of de Kooning’s “Suburb in Havana” (1958). It’s one of my favorite de Koonings. I first saw it in a piece by T. J. Clark called “Frank Auerbach’s London” (London Review of Books, September 10, 2015). Clark writes, 

If I’d been able to glimpse a de Kooning landscape from ten years earlier – say, Suburb in Havana from 1958 – lurking under Autumn Morning, I might have been a little less at sea. But the problem would only have shifted ground. I would still have had to sort out why and how de Kooning’s elegant, lavatorial graffiti – his Cuban-blue depth, the lavish decisiveness of his foreground ‘V’ – were turned in the Auerbach into a kind of waterlogged storm-streaked slipperiness. 

"Elegant lavatorial graffiti"? Ouch. Clark has thrown a barb. Is he right? 

3. A shout-out to photographer Heami Lee for her delectable pizza shot in Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Cactus Wren.”

4. And let’s give a huzzah for Alena Skarina’s wonderful, eye-catching illustration for Elizabeth Kolbert’s disconcerting “Seeds of Doubt.”