Most retrospectives unfold like a stately procession. You buy your ticket and proceed through a choreographed sequence of galleries, scrutinizing first the juvenilia, then the promising early work. Next come the triumphal years, and finally (if the artist was lucky) a poignant late phase. An idea of timelessness prevails, enhanced by an enveloping atmosphere of climate control, security, and massive insurance coverage. The lighting is good; the frames are tasteful. Everything looks marvelous.There’s not a whiff of the urgency of the studio, no hint of the emotional or psychological state in which these objects were made. Lost is any suggestion of that feeling, deep inside the creator, of an improvised, inner necessity.“Willem de Kooning Drawing,” at the Art Institute of Chicago, is a classic retrospective—a decorous, deeply researched exhibition about a much-lauded artist at a major museum. In another, more robust sense, however, the show is a giant debauch. It’s frankly (and thrillingly) unseemly. I’ve never been to an art show that takes you so far inside the creative process. You start to wonder if you should even be permitted to get so close. Photo by Harry BowdenWillem de Kooning sitting with charcoal drawings scattered on the floor in his studio at 85 Fourth Avenue, New York, 1946.“Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure,” De Kooning once said. “I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity.” This show, more than any other De Kooning exhibit I’ve seen, delivers on the spirit of that oft-quoted statement. De Kooning, arguably the most widely revered of America’s 20th-century avant-garde artists, took the language of drawing, ripped it up, and rearranged it. Put that way, what he did sounds rebellious. It sounds punk. The exhibition, which will travel to the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam, in early October, embraces that spirit. But it has a more conservative purpose, which is to demonstrate that you can’t rip up art’s language effectively—or interestingly—without first really knowing it.De Kooning knew, from long study, how to draw contours. He knew how to create volume using gradations in tone or marks that move in certain ways, how to apply ink or paint with varying degrees of pressure and velocity, and how to employ color relations to suggest depth. Before you can throw all that technique up in the air and have it land again, you need to have the tools.De Kooning was both the best draftsman and the most lavishly gifted painter of the generation of postwar artists (among them Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Mark Rothko, and Helen Frankenthaler) who helped move the art world’s center of gravity from Paris to New York. Born in the Netherlands in 1904, he trained, from the age of 13, as a commercial artist at the Rotterdam Academy of Visual Arts and Technical Sciences while apprenticing with a design firm.The show kicks off with a large drawing, Dish With Jugs, that De Kooning made at the academy. Working in charcoal and conté crayon two days a week for an entire year—600 hours—the young student achieved a remarkable level of photographic verisimilitude in the still life. As one of the exhibit’s curators, Kevin Salatino, writes of De Kooning’s trajectory in an introductory essay for the show’s catalog, the drawing became “the archetype of what he would forcibly reject while retaining the learned skills the work so brilliantly exemplifies, only now putting them to radically different purposes.”The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.Willem de Kooning, Dish With Jugs, about 1919–21. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Van Day Truex Fund, 1983, 1983.436.That De Kooning could draw like Ingres (or like Picasso during his Ingres-inspired period, from roughly 1917 to 1925) is amply demonstrated by other early works in the show, such as his adoring, fastidiously controlled pencil portrait of Elaine Fried, a fellow artist and his future wife. But, like a libertine desiring undiscovered pleasures, his appetite for new sensations only seemed to grow with time.Drawing has long been regarded as an intellectual activity, something generated, above all, by the mind, with its capacity for conceiving, imagining, and mandating. (You draw to design buildings and invent machines; you “draw up” battle plans and national borders.) “Drawing, as a way of thinking,” Salatino notes of De Kooning, “lay at the core of his practice, the root of everything.”But is it thought, as such, that we’re seeing in De Kooning’s drawings? The critic Peter Schjeldahl, who knew the artist, described him as “a hand with a man attached.” If you can attribute thought to a hand—and I’m willing to admit that you can, but it surely isn’t rational—then this show is indeed a record of thinking. But it may be better described as the record of some more mysterious melting of mind into body.The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New YorkWillem de Kooning, Woman, 1951. Private collection.The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950–52. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Purchase, 478.1953.De Kooning came to America as a stowaway in 1926. Residing first in Hoboken, New Jersey, for less than a year before settling in New York City, he remained without legal status for the next 35 years. During an extended period of hard graft as a house-and-sign painter, a window dresser, a show-card letterer, and an advertising-layout man, he encountered various avant-garde artists, including Arshile Gorky, who became a close friend. Under the Armenian American painter’s influence, he gradually shifted his focus from commercial art to modernist fine art, experimenting with different styles derived from Picasso, Miró, and Matisse.[Read: The painter who shaped Rothko]Even when ostensibly abstract, De Kooning’s work was populated by bobbling fragments of body parts. He conveyed these with his characteristic wobbling contours and flesh-textured paint. “Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash,” he once said. “It’s very tiny—very tiny, content.” He proceeded in the studio intuitively, precipitously, as if wanting to catch his subjects unawares.De Kooning had his first solo show in 1948. He broke through to widespread acclaim in 1950 with Excavation, a painting he labored over for many weeks, using a process of patient buildup and repeated erasure. At almost seven feet high and more than eight feet wide, Excavation was the largest canvas he’d ever worked on. (The following year, it was awarded a prize by the Art Institute of Chicago, which subsequently acquired it.) The work was initially inspired by scenes from an Italian movie, Bitter Rice, an art-house hit in Greenwich Village that year, showing young peasant women working in water-soaked fields. But over time, the bodies dissolved into their surroundings and the pictorial space flattened out into a scrim of fleetingly seen forms with hooked and curving contours that push forward from the surface or twist back into shallow space. The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Pierre Le Hors.Willem de Kooning, Elaine de Kooning, about 1940–41. Collection of Clare Stone.If, in its genesis, the work recalled Picasso’s proto-cubist breakthrough, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon—the Spaniard’s 1907 painting of five naked women in a brothel—it also pointed the way to what would become a more explicit, and enduring, obsession for De Kooning: depictions of women, wobbly-edged, many of them leering or aggressive, disintegrating before our eyes into a welter of ambient marks. Inspired by prehistoric figurines of such powerful female divinities as the Venus of Willendorf, and by depictions of women by Rubens and Picasso—and riffing, too, on female figures in contemporary cartoons, movies, and magazine advertisements—De Kooning’s women take up a hefty portion of the show.The critic Harold Rosenberg, an early champion of his work, admired the classical balance of Excavation, likening it to “a formula wrung out of testing explosives.” Observing De Kooning drawing, another critic, Thomas Hess, noted that the artist “made a few strokes, then almost instinctively, it seemed to me, turned the pencil around and began to go over the graphite marks with the eraser. Not to rub out the lines but to move them, push them across the paper.” De Kooning’s line, he concluded, “is always under attack.”This ethos of creative destruction remained a guiding principle for De Kooning. The artist’s methods, however, continued to change. His drawings appear to be in a state of constant becoming. Shapes swell and fall away. They coalesce and unravel. De Kooning’s reversals of figure and ground aren’t binary or static, as in classic cubism; they’re in flux, like water moving in water.The show’s emphasis on the muck and mess of the studio may explain why artists in the Chicago area have flocked to the exhibit—and keep on returning, according to Mel Becker Solomon (who organized the show with Salatino, Margaret Holben Ellis, and Charlotte Healy). Solomon recounted to me that she walked through the exhibition with an artist, who told her, “This is what students are missing in their current practice: the tenacity and rigor to keep pushing, experimenting, and searching for what comes next.”The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Robert Lifson.Willem de Kooning, Excavation, 1950. The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan Purchase Prize Fund; purchased with funds provided by Edgar J. Kaufmann, Jr., and Mr. and Mrs. Noah Goldowsky.What the show demonstrates, in ways that aren’t always obvious with his paintings, is that De Kooning never lost touch with the vocational skills he acquired as a young man. As Rosenberg wrote in 1962, “There was not a trick of the painter’s trade that de Kooning did not have up his sleeve.” Ellis, a paper conservator at the Art Institute of Chicago, lists those “tricks” in the catalog and explains how De Kooning adapted them to purposes for which they were never intended. She describes, for instance, his use of carbon-transfer paper and translucent vellum to copy motifs from one drawing to another. Such processes were typically used to duplicate technical drawings. But De Kooning would apply fragments of the reproductions to new compositions, often in different orientations.He also used frottage, or rubbing—another technique favored by commercial artists—to activate his lines. He would apply charcoal to thin vellum placed over corrugated cardboard or other textured surfaces to give the marks a stuttering look. “Frottage transformed stillness into speed,” Ellis writes of Reclining Nude, a 1963 drawing. This observation approaches the core of De Kooning’s art: More than any other artist I can think of, he gave painted marks and lines different velocities and trajectories. Co-existing in the same composition, those visible shifts in speed, thickness, and direction carved out three-dimensional spaces of ravishing complexity and urgency.[Read: Did Marcel Duchamp ruin art?]Salatino suggests, in his catalog essay, that the artist’s use of frottage “functions, inescapably, as a metaphor for the masturbatory—making and meaning converging in an act dependent upon the probing, rubbing, exploring hand.” Salatino is a first-rate curator, but this sort of writing, to which his introduction is rather too prone, gives art writing a bad name. De Kooning didn’t traffic in metaphors. He wasn’t interested in meanings. There’s a reason Susan Sontag quoted him at the beginning of her essay “Against Interpretation.”Other techniques that De Kooning learned as a commercial artist included cutting out parts of images he found in magazines and inserting them into his compositions, or using masking tape and paper overlays to give his own marks abrupt, crisp boundaries.The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Juan Molina Hernández.Willem de Kooning, Untitled, about 1950. The Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Katharine Kuh.When drawing, De Kooning loved to use liner and sword brushes, which are favored by sign painters. Both have short handles and extended, bushy bristles. Loaded with ink and applied with control, they allow artists to make long, even lines. De Kooning had mastered their use as a younger man. (Ellis reports that the illustrator Gus Falk, who was taught by De Kooning at Black Mountain College, remembered him applying a perfectly even line to a spinning bicycle wheel by holding the brush steady. “He was in control,” Falk said. “He was interested in exactitude.”) But in his own drawing, De Kooning let rip with liner brushes, swishing them about all over the paper, achieving undulant lines that contract and expand like living creatures.Perhaps the most remarkable of De Kooning’s maladapted techniques was his use of fixatives. The word itself suggests De Kooning’s perversity. Fixatives are sprayed onto vulnerable media, such as charcoal and crayon, to stabilize drawn marks. But instead of spraying a fine, even mist from an appropriate distance, De Kooning aimed the fixative straight at his drawings from close range, creating puddles and rivulets that turned the paper gray, creating strange, smudgy marks and chemical textures.Later in his career, De Kooning tried drawing with his eyes closed or with both hands at once. Long plagued by alcoholism, he was often inebriated. “I’m in my element when I am a little bit out of this world,” he once said. “When I’m falling, I’m doing all right; when I’m slipping, I say, Hey, this is interesting!” The words could sound somewhat pathetic, like a drunk man’s sad, self-soothing rationalization. But the relationship between De Kooning’s virtuosity and the lengths to which he went just to get in his own way is intriguing to consider.The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New YorkWillem de Kooning, Reclining Nude, 1963. Private collection, United States.Clement Greenberg, the most influential critic of the postwar period, framed the problem in a review of De Kooning’s first solo show. The artist’s “really great facility,” Greenberg argued, risked getting in the way of his ability to express authentic emotion with real originality. “Facility,” Greenberg argued, “has a stubbornness of its own and is loath to abandon easy satisfactions.”For Greenberg, “easy satisfactions” were always close to kitsch. But his assessment was reductive. De Kooning was an immigrant from Europe. His extensive training and virtuosic way with line connected him to an evolving tradition of European drawing that led from Tintoretto, Rubens, Delacroix, and Ingres to, in the modern era, Picasso and Matisse. He would never disown that tradition.But he was in America now. It was the 20th century. Young women were screaming in front of the Beatles. Crowds crammed into theaters to see Marilyn Monroe magnified on the screen. Betty Boop and Minnie Mouse bounced from frame to frame in the cartoons. De Kooning—neither calm nor pure and “wrapped,” as he had put it, “in the melodrama of vulgarity”—longed to incorporate all this impudent American energy into the authority of his European inheritance, and especially into his drawings and paintings of female figures.His efforts to interfere with his own facility were an expression both of his dividedness and of his deep hunger for freedom. Anyone who stands in front of De Kooning’s urgent, sensuously greedy drawings, with their writhing contours, cacophonous colors, and perverse processes, can feel the force of that craving.