On a portentous day in 1958, Willem de Kooning was at work on a painting in his Manhattan studio. Over the previous few years he had moved away from his tortured, frenzied Women in favor of less–densely worked pictures, their power and energy concentrated into fewer strokes of broad, calligraphic paint. This one in particular, a horizontal canvas of about fifty by sixty inches, contained three prominent slashes—of red, yellow, and sky blue on an off-white ground—as well as a couple of vertical black strokes. At some point, de Kooning must have turned his back on the canvas or stepped out of the room. Unbeknown to him, the story goes, his two-year-old daughter then clambered into the studio, mucked her hands in some white paint, and began pawing the canvas, leaving nine or ten tiny handprints on the work.
De Kooning’s response—his artistic response—was not to throw out the painting or cover up the unexpected handprints. Instead, he left them as is, embracing the “accident” of the event—a move informed perhaps by his love for his daughter, but one that was also typical of the master Ab-Exer’s proclivity for chance and serendipitous discovery. The work, handprints and all, is now in the collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts under the fitting title of Lisbeth’s Painting.
I kept thinking of this work and its story when I saw “once, and twice,” a solo exhibition of eight new paintings by Sangram Majumdar, on view through April 12 at Geary in Lower Manhattan. A standout work, expulsion (2019), contains a field of mint green, upon which sits a variety of abstract marks and shapes. Staccato dashes and blips whirl around the outer edges of the canvas, stretching inward but never quite moving all the way into the center of the work. Also reaching in, from the upper-left-hand edge, is a tan form in the shape of a hand—about the size of a small child’s. Below this, one then notices what appear to be the ghosted outlines of two other hands. The resonance between Lisbeth’s Painting and expulsion feels so strong that I’d have a hard time believing Majumdar didn’t have the earlier work in mind when he was painting. Those unexpected hands introduce an aspect of human pathos to both works, upsetting our perception of them only as formal exercise.
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