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Lot Essay
Willem de Kooning drew endlessly, constantly challenging his hand and his eye with new obstacles to keep his work vivid and full of motion. During the 1960s, in a continual process of self-discovery and awareness, de Kooning experimented by drawing with both hands, with his eyes closed, using multiple instruments and while watching television. Considered one of the greatest and most inventive draftsman of the twentieth century, for de Kooning, the process of drawing was intimately coupled with all processes of art making. He drew on everything from bags to grocery receipts, but it was paper-smooth, permanent and hard-that he favored most. He preferred charcoal for its limitless textural and tonal possibilities, which is reflected in the expressive and painterly nature of his drawing.
De Kooning moved to The Springs on Long Island in 1963. Away from the "no-environment" of Manhattan, de Kooning connected with his surroundings and his lively interest in the world around him is reflected in his drawings from this period. In Seated Woman on a Beach there is no separation between the figure's features and the landscape: her shoulders become sand-dunes, her feet become waves. With her head cocked seductively to the side and her knees brought up to her chin, her wide eyes shy away from the viewer in a coquettish, playful manner characteristic of the women the artist admired at the beach. De Kooning returned to this particular image in 1985 when he used an opaque projector to project a Xeroxed copy of the drawing onto a large canvas where he transformed the hurried charcoal swipes into bold red, white and blue colored brushstrokes. The resulting painting, Untitled, 1986, is in the collection of the Willem de Kooning Revocable Trust.
"As we have come to see, the spontaneity that was such a vital part of Abstract Expressionism was fueled not by unmediated emotion, but by copious visual contemplation, whether in the case of Jack Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, or de Kooning. All were united in imbuing their paintings with the visible palpitation of a physical organism -a luminous grammaticization of space. But in their embodiment and their mirroring of the layered flux of consciousness from which they emanated, de Kooning's spatial constructs are singular" (K. Kertess, Willem de Kooning In Process, exh. cat., Museum of Art Ft. Lauderdale, 2000, p. 16).
De Kooning moved to The Springs on Long Island in 1963. Away from the "no-environment" of Manhattan, de Kooning connected with his surroundings and his lively interest in the world around him is reflected in his drawings from this period. In Seated Woman on a Beach there is no separation between the figure's features and the landscape: her shoulders become sand-dunes, her feet become waves. With her head cocked seductively to the side and her knees brought up to her chin, her wide eyes shy away from the viewer in a coquettish, playful manner characteristic of the women the artist admired at the beach. De Kooning returned to this particular image in 1985 when he used an opaque projector to project a Xeroxed copy of the drawing onto a large canvas where he transformed the hurried charcoal swipes into bold red, white and blue colored brushstrokes. The resulting painting, Untitled, 1986, is in the collection of the Willem de Kooning Revocable Trust.
"As we have come to see, the spontaneity that was such a vital part of Abstract Expressionism was fueled not by unmediated emotion, but by copious visual contemplation, whether in the case of Jack Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, or de Kooning. All were united in imbuing their paintings with the visible palpitation of a physical organism -a luminous grammaticization of space. But in their embodiment and their mirroring of the layered flux of consciousness from which they emanated, de Kooning's spatial constructs are singular" (K. Kertess, Willem de Kooning In Process, exh. cat., Museum of Art Ft. Lauderdale, 2000, p. 16).