Black and White in Willem de Kooning's "Light in August"

Willem de Kooning’s decision to title one of his so-called “black paintings” Light in August (1947) suggests how significant he found William Faulkner’s novel of the same name (1932). He even commented that he’d “like to paint Joe Christmas one of these days,” alluding to the novel’s protagonist, an ambiguously Christlike figure obsessed with his own ambiguous racial origins. “There was something definitely rootless about [Christmas],” the narrator tells us, “as though no town nor city was his, no street, no walls, no square of earth his home.” Art historian Charles Stuckey has argued that de Kooning’s painting uses shifting black and white tonality in a manner suggestive of Christmas’s doubtful racial identity. This paper extends that argument to claim that de Kooning’s painting creates unstable relations between not only black and white, but also between textuality and figuration, figure and ground, void and visual weight. De Kooning’s simultaneously abstract and representational imagery—what Clement Greenberg called “homeless representation” —parallels a “rootlessness” in Christmas. When de Kooning claims that what sets him apart from painters like Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still - whom he says are “making art out of John Brown’s body” - is that he retains a “point of reference” steeped in “tradition,” he places the long shadow of American race relations in dialogue with the history of painting. De Kooning suggests that the “rootlessness” that characterizes Christmas is not only a reflection of racial ambiguity, but also an expression of the ambiguity of figuration itself.