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Gansevoort Street

A warm tone of reddish orange seems to be the color of everything on Gansevoort Street, as painted by Willem de Kooning in oil on cardboard, two and half feet tall by three and half feet wide. Yet there is more than enough shadow and contrast to see their shapes and contours. De Kooning has blended reddish orange paint with varying amounts of its neutralizing complementary color, blue, to blacken the shadows and evoke different degrees of shading. Elsewhere he has blended the reddish-orange with white to evoke different brightnesses. Strips and patches of glare appear here and there as white alone, and black shadow lines everywhere curve, zig zag, and carve across the reddish-orange, varying from fat to thin and from sloppy to tidy. At first sight, the painting seems a collage of haphazard cutouts. One by one, certain shapes make sense as parts of a three-dimensional view.

A little below the approximate center of de Kooning’s painting is his most explicit hint of something real and familiar. By its shape, position, and size in relation to what could be a roofline, it appears to represent a square chimney or vent with a triangular cap. The angle between the facing side of the chimney and the one on the right suggest the perspective from which the painter is looking out, and the shading suggests where the sun is—which may be quite low in the sky. The entire right side of the chimney shines in a single shade of yellow that appears almost nowhere else in the painting, while the front face is mostly dark in shades of lavender and purple. Left of the chimney, where the edges of two roofs slope down to meet in a V, there is a suggestion of a street, which is the only hint of one in the painting, and seemingly must be Gansevoort Street. Just enough is visible to see that it is a street, and one running at a slightly upward incline, but almost level, invisibly obscured across the rest through the painting. The surface of the street is tinted somewhat white, as if directly in sunlight. Its nearer edge in the pit of the V is a short shadow line, while the longer line of the far edge is mostly white, like the reflecting face of a curb.

A simple rectangle to the right of the chimney and a square to the left and below suggest windows in the foreground. Bold black lines across the upper half of the painting could be the roofs and awnings on the opposite side of Gansevoort Street. But their shapes and angles don’t perfectly lend themselves to that idea.

In the lower right of the painting is a concentration of detail and of blobs of white, yellow, and blue. Shaped roughly like a torso and head and larger than the chimney, the collection of blobs and detail farthest to the right could be a person in the very near foreground. Based on this hunch, less obvious whitened torso-shaped figures of diminishing size suddenly suggest a trail of pedestrians behind the first person all approaching along a sidewalk. Over the third in the line, a white oval overlaps with the chimney, providing the clearest suggestion of a head. The torso of the second in line appears as a pair of blue-black vertical bars framing two splotches of white, with a strip of orange down the middle that widens toward the bottom like a tie in the open front of a jacket.

The painting gradually makes enough sense to believe that all of it does: Hints of detail in the other corners, a splash of maroon along the left edge. It all might take you back there, if you knew Gansevoort Street in 1949.