Willem de Kooning review – the artist’s lifelong rebellion against himself is thrilling to watch

Marking a century since the Dutch artist stowed away to New York, this vast retrospective gloriously showcases the abstract expressionist’s fierce boundary-pushing

Willem de Kooning was the last great artist who really knew how to draw. More precisely, if less provocatively, he was the last truly transformative painter to have been schooled in the academic tradition that produces what is still recognised, by most people, as “good drawing”. Accurate in the sense of a photograph but, like a filter on your cameraphone, also subtly tidying up the world to meet the ideals of classical proportion. “Draw what you see and not what you think,” the young De Kooning was told. Raw personal emotion had no place – a far cry from what this master of abstract expressionism was to become.

The intense labour required to build a connection between eye, brain and hand so quick as to be instinctive is illustrated by the charcoal still life Dish With Jugs. Made when De Kooning was in his mid-teens, and so minutely rendered that you might mistake it for a sepia photograph, the catalogue estimates that it took 600 hours at the Rotterdam academy to complete. The aim of this exercise was not to produce a single picture so much as to ingrain a way of seeing and reconstructing the world to the point that it becomes inescapable.

This brilliantly researched exhibition makes a compelling case for the success of that training. Setting a handful of standout paintings among a wider selection of drawings illustrates the artist’s lifelong rebellion against rules so thoroughly internalised that he could push fiercely at their limits without entirely breaking them. The battle is thrilling to watch.

De Kooning’s formative training is apparent in an early drawing of the dancer Juliet Browner and a marvellously deft portrait of the artist’s wife, Elaine. The influence of Ingres – the Pelé of academic drawing – on these works has often been remarked upon, not least by rival New York painters for whom De Kooning’s superior draughtsmanship was a source of suspicion (too prissy, too European). And it seems that the immigrant artist placed himself under pressure to unstitch the aesthetic conventions of the old world and rework them into something more appropriate to the new: irreverent, free, immediate, expressive.

It is important to note that De Kooning’s education was not limited to the academy. A working-class kid, his evening classes had been subsidised by the design firm where he worked in the day; after stowing away to the US at 22, he scraped a living as a sign painter and commercial illustrator. These lessons made their way into his art, and the difficulty of synthesising them might explain the struggles of his early career (he didn’t have a solo show until he was nearly 44) and how revolutionary the breakthrough was when it did arrive.

Central to that achievement was that he made no distinction between drawing and painting (the tradition being, in simple terms, that you draw the outlines and paint the space between them). In Queen of Hearts, a harbinger of women to come, he drags charcoal sticks across wet paint to create soft edges, sanding down and painting over layers like a housepainter. The big bang arrives in the seminal work on paper completed in 1949, an arrangement of white sparks against a black ground that calls to mind comets dancing through the night sky. But De Kooning was no starry-eyed mystic: at the bottom edge, transforming those white sparks into liquid spurts, is a scrawled cock and balls.

Excavation, a knockout masterpiece, likewise appears at first as an abstract pattern of interlocking shapes only to reveal itself as a maelstrom of screaming faces and dismembered body parts. Completed in 1950, it conjures both Europe’s mass graves and an orgiastic ecstasy of bodies dissolving into each other. Sex and death, heaven and hell, the end of the old world and the birth of the new. In one of many intelligent arrangements, Excavation is paired with a drawing from four years earlier, the aptly titled Judgment Day.

It is a quirk of the exhibition that its most famous painting, Woman I, hangs in a separate gallery normally reserved for the museum’s treasures from the Dutch golden age. Not only does this icon hold its own against Vermeer and Rembrandt, but she is also unexpectedly at home. Scandalous when first exhibited, the accusation that this cartoonish, charismatic and wild figure defames all womankind by its “monstrosity” seems now to rely on some mid-century assumptions about how women should be represented. Whatever you think about Woman I, she could never be mistaken for a submissive sex object or a Stepford wife.

De Kooning’s relentless attacks on convention, which is to say on himself and everything else, took their toll. A series of black-and-white works, made in Rome in the late 1950s, mark the end of his imperial phase. While these vaguely calligraphic graphic signs illustrate a point about the convergence of painting and drawing, they feel to me slapdash and derivative of Franz Kline. From here, this exhibition does little to overturn the conventional wisdom that De Kooning struggled over the next two decades to scale the same heights. There are standouts – notably the irrepressible Clam Diggers, a woozy portrait of two women standing in shallow water rendered in ice-cream colours and buttery textures, and a gorgeously fleshy painting from the mid-70s that advertises the painter’s occasionally overlooked gift as a colourist. If the paintings are hit and miss, the drawings from this period reveal that, even hindered by alcoholism and a chaotic personal life, De Kooning could always rely on his line.

That line holds to the end. The show closes with an astonishing painting from 1985, during the period when De Kooning’s cognitive decline was increasingly apparent. Sinuous blue and black lines curve across a mottled white ground, weaving a pattern suggestive of bodies and yet emptied of desire. It is serene, strange and straightforwardly beautiful, as if everything that the artist had struggled to pack into his work had been boiled down to basic principles. He is back to fitting the world to a pleasing form. The difference is that it is no longer a boilerplate inherited from the classical tradition, but shaped by his experiences and entirely his own. He doesn’t need to think about it. The battle is over.

• Willem de Kooning at Work is at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, from 9 October to 17 January