Sagamore

"For de Kooning, the urge is to include everything, to give nothing up, even if it means working in a turmoil of contradictions…a turmoil of contradictions is his favorite medium." Thomas B. Hess

Painted in 1955 during a period of rapturous innovation, Willem de Kooning’s Sagamore is notable not only for its virtuosic brushwork but also for the richness of its abstraction. Created toward the end of his breakthrough Women paintings, this canvas set the stage for a more pointed investigation of the bustling urban sphere in which the artist lived. Never completely abandoning representation like his fellow Abstract Expressionists, de Kooning worked to infuse his heavily-worked surfaces with allusions to figures, buildings, and daily life. “For de Kooning, the urge is to include everything, to give nothing up, even if it means working in a turmoil of contradictions…a turmoil of contradictions is his favorite medium” (T. B. Hess, de Kooning: Recent Paintings, 1972, p. 20). Unrepentantly abstract, Sagamore extracts a gritty energy from the city and transforms it on the picture plane. The buildings and the bustle are there just below the surface waiting to burst forth.

A bold yet intimate example, Sagamore is rife with the overwhelming energy that de Kooning harnessed within his expansive oeuvre. Realized atop a barely-seen neutral ground, thick areas of impasto oil and enamel have been applied in vigorous strokes. Bits of charcoal, themselves reminders of the artist’s sincere preparatory process, peek out from the edges but are quickly consumed by their colorful counterparts. This practice of supportive drawings found a corollary in de Kooning’s colleague Arshile Gorky, who similarly embraced a confluence of line and bright color to fight against the supremacy of the Cubist grid. In Sagamore, this structure is pushed and twisted as the lower left area of bright canary yellow draws the eye immediately while the lower right is a mottled mixture of blue, pink, and gray that fades backward. The top portion is dominated by two patches of bodily peach that are tangled in a visceral net of red and black. Green, white, and aquamarine peer through as well in a bawdy display of hues typical of the artist’s extensive palette. “One day,” de Kooning noted wryly, “I’d like to get all the colors in the world into one single painting” (W. de Kooning, quoted in J. Russell, “I See the Canvas and I Begin,” New York Times, 5 February 1978, p. D1). Areas in which myriad hues coalesce into a cloudy amalgam are the result of de Kooning applying newsprint to the wet surface and peeling it back as a means of altering his compositions with a more automatist bent. These looser planes are balanced by the decisive black strokes that spiderweb throughout the composition, their bold presence encapsulating each field of color like outlines that push the viewer into thinking about the painter’s more representative works.

De Kooning’s practice drew upon the world around him, and as such Sagamore was likely inspired by a diner of the same name that was located near the artist’s studio on Third Avenue and Eighth Street in New York City. This beatnik establishment, situated within the heart of the creative community at the time, would have been a perfect vantage point for the painter to observe the comings and goings of the Lower East Side.

Evolving out of the early figuration of his critically acclaimed Women paintings, the Abstract Urban Landscapes, of which the current example is a member, have that same fleshy handling of paint that the artist adopted as his signature. Though ostensibly an abstraction of the city around him, Sagamore takes cues from earlier works like Woman and Bicycle (1952-1953) where the titular subject melds entirely with her surroundings. The present work is not as much a representation of the diner but more so the nonstop vitality and movement that surrounded its edifice. The pulsating human energy of New York is vibrantly on display as buildings morph into torsos and streets become meandering appendages. However, there is no direct connection to a particular person, place, or thing. Instead, the very spirit of the urban realm is translated through the artist’s brush. There is no ground plane, no perspective, and no immediate focal point in these abstractions. As the artist once quipped, “I try to free myself from the notion of top and bottom, left and right, from realism! Everything should float” (W. de Kooning, quoted in M. Prather, in Willem de Kooning: Paintings, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1994, p. 174). This idea is especially poignant in works like Sagamore where representation fades into the background and the artist’s more painterly actions come to the fore.

Alternating between heady reflection and vivacious action, de Kooning painted in bursts of energy in order to capture the action of painting as instantaneously as possible. Nonetheless, rather than approaching the canvas with wild abandon, he ruminated intensely upon his next steps before lashing out with hardware store brushes and salad bowls filled with homemade paint mixtures. “How much time there was concentrating and looking,” Emilie Kilgore recalled after observing the artist later in life in his studio. “Sitting in that chair! Maybe having a cigarette. But still just looking with such intensity. And then getting up and walking over…still with his eye on the painting and then Kershewwww! Everything leading up to it was so long and then he got there and it was always pretty quick” (E. Kilgore, quoted in M. Stevens and A. Swan, De Kooning: An American Master, New York 2005, pp. 542-543). Using emulsifiers to fluff his oils into a thick froth, de Kooning brought tactility to his surfaces that always remarked upon the long tradition of fleshy figures throughout art history. Even in works like Sagamore, which take their subjects from cityscapes and the urban sprawl, one is hard-pressed to discount the meaty, corpulent pinks and reds as they squirm against their surroundings like people pressed against each other on the sidewalks or subways of New York.