Baby Carriage

Is this a picture of an empty baby carriage seen from above, or a newborn child seen front-on? One glimpses only hints of content in this unusual painting—lips, an extended hand, a yellow carriage cover, a tan blanket or nose or lump of flesh. The gray shape on the left is at once a handlebar and an ear attached to a screaming face. Bands of red, white, and blue across the top of the painting could be two walls and a floor, a flag on a street, or some type of negative space. Forms mix together in a primordial soup, continually reemerging as different objects.

To achieve this spatial ambiguity, de Kooning has made wet, dense brushstrokes over dry, wispy patches. In the matte areas, he has applied paint with paper towels, leaving footprints in their surfaces. As the patches have dried, medium has seeped out around their edges onto the paper, creating oily shadows that push the yellow and white shapes forward from the picture plane. Denser brushed lines then appear as rigid objects on these surfaces. This effect, especially visible in the lower right corner of the work, incorporates bare paper into the image itself as ground.

This painting not only shows de Kooning’s interest in experimental paint-application techniques; it also reflects his heightened interest in drawing in the 1970s. The wet grays and greens are more sketch-marks than brushstrokes. They outline spaces and stand for objects rather than replicating their appearance.