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拍品專文
I don’t have any convictions except my paintings. Willem de Kooning
A rare, exceptional example of Willem de Kooning’s painterly prowess, Untitled I is one of only a handful of canvases which the Abstract Expressionist produced in 1980. The work brilliantly reveals the master at his most contemplative, subtly changing his technique and style in reaction to the ease with which he now felt painting in style of his works of the earlier 1970s. Here, de Kooning employs longer, crisper, broader brushstrokes which push the boundaries of his compositional constructions. The artist approached his canvas with new ribbon-like lightness, redeploying his previous styles in a revelatory novel way. As the art historian John Elderfield notes, here “the loosening of fit, and its consequences… was part of a perennial, alternating pattern of expansion and contraction, for the artist as natural as breathing” (de Kooning: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2011, p. 450).
Untitled I demarcates a bold new period which would mark the last decade of de Kooning’s artistic production. The artist had suffered several tribulations from 1978, where the loss of several close friends, including Tom Hess and Harold Rosenberg, coupled with the disastrous news that many of his earlier painting were in critical condition due to his experimental media, and his personal struggles with alcoholism, had a deleterious effect on his artistic output. 1980 inaugurated both personal and artistic breakthroughs—his newfound sobriety allowed de Kooning to begin to work again, finding renewed strength through his painterly practice as he rethought his creative methods. As he noted to the art patron Olga Hirshorn, “In [my] line of work… the very worse can turn out for the good” (quoted in J. Zilczer, A Way of Living: The Art of Willem de Kooning, New York, 2014, p. 227).
Untitled I is one of a few of what are known as the “impossible paintings” created in the late 1970s and early 1980s. De Kooning laid swathes of troweled white across the ground of his canvas, over which he marbled sweeping gestures of thalo green, cobalt, and orange, mingled with a shot of violet. Describing these “extraordinary paintings,” Elderfield eloquently elaborates how de Kooning’s colors “pulse and hover like the Northern Lights over a still pond. If jumping ship was his first big splash, de Kooning kept the water moving afterward. His paint handling spanned an encyclopedia of traditions. His imagery groped back to wide-eyed Isis. Bruegel and Cranach’s women come on board” (quoted in “John Elderfield, Jennifer Field, Lauren Mahony, and Delphine Huisinga with Phong Bui,” The Brooklyn Rail, December 2011–January 2012, online [accessed 4/14/2026]). De Kooning reengaged with the art historical tradition with renewed vigor, studying the techniques of the Old Masters while reconsidering their handling of color. Untitled I in particular recalls the style and color of the Venetian Renaissance artists, particularly Titian and Giorgione. As the scholar Stephen Mack writes, “many of the fundamental aspects of de Kooning’s art have their origins in Venetian artistic traditions. The Venetians, having devised novel ways of depicting landscapes in oil, invented the genre of the pastoral landscape in painting, an important historical precedent for de Kooning’s work of the 1960s and ‘70s” (“Willem de Kooning and the Venetian Renaissance,” in De Kooning and Italy, exh. cat., Galerie dell’Accademia, Venice, 2024, p. 51).
Thalo green is a notoriously difficult pigment to work with, proving nigh impossible to properly incorporate into chromatic harmony with other colors. De Kooning’s bold choice to foreground the color in Untitled I expresses the artist’s determined ambition as he entered his eighth decade. When he viewed his 1978 exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Willem de Kooning in East Hampton, de Kooning said to his assistant, “I can’t go wrong with these pictures” (quoted in ibid.). The artist undertook to reevaluate his painterly praxis, seeking new challenges in order to breathe a new vitality into his work. “I don’t have any convictions except my paintings,” the artist declared the year the present work was made (quoted in E. Lieber, Willem de Kooning: Reflections in the Studio, New York, 2000, p. 49).
Just because you’re getting old doesn’t mean you’re getting any better. But I have a feeling I can do it better now Willem de Kooning
Describing the new body of work which de Kooning debuted at the turn of the decade, Elderfield writes, “when compared with the many preceding abstractions, they reveal an increased use of the taper’s knife (the flat-bladed tool used in drywall construction to spread spackle over taped joints) to spread swaths of thick paint, now into discrete bands or ribbons of varying widths” (J. Elderfield, op. cit., p. 447). In employing the taper’s knife in his new body of work, de Kooning looked back to his younger self, rejuvenating the techniques he first mastered as a young artist newly arrived in New York. The Dutch artist had arrived in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1926, finding employment as a house and sign painter before moving into the city and befriending Arshile Gorky, John Graham, and Stuart Davis. His manipulation of the painted surface in Untitled I, using his knife to scrape away pigment, recapitulated his earliest work in the United States. As Judith Zilczer describes, “in the end, he would mine a lifetime of studio experience to craft a new painting process grounded in his graphic sensibility” (J. Zilczer, op. cit., p. 227).
The present work was exhibited in his longtime dealer Xavier Fourcade’s exhibition One Major New Work Each the year it was made, alongside work by the likes of Joan Mitchell, Roy Lichtenstein, and Louise Bourgeois. It was then featured the following year in the fifth Whitney Biennial, after which the work was acquired by the eminent Philadelphia art collector David Pincus. The Pincus collection included exceptional masterpieces of American postwar art, including important works by Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Barnett Newman, as well as deep holdings of de Kooning’s work. When the Pincus collection came to auction in 2012, records were broken for Pollock, Newman, and Rothko. Untitled I then ascended into an important European collection of abstract paintings, demonstrating the continued import of the work.
Untitled I ushers in the last decade of de Kooning’s celebrated oeuvre, revealing for the first time the fluid, ribbon-like brushstrokes which would coalesce into the lyrical abstractions of his late period. By utterly reducing his painterly style, seeking novel forms out from old ideas, de Kooning was able to successfully reinvent his practice, allowing him to emerge out from a creative and personal stupor which plagued the last years of the 1970s. Remarkable in its visual impact and astounding in its formal intelligence, the present work marks the last new beginning in de Kooning’s constantly metamorphosing practice. “It’s not going to be easy,” the artist wittily remarked to his interlocutor Judith Wolfe in the beginning of the decade. “Just because you’re getting old doesn’t mean you’re getting any better. But I have a feeling I can do it better now” (quoted in ibid., p. 232).
A rare, exceptional example of Willem de Kooning’s painterly prowess, Untitled I is one of only a handful of canvases which the Abstract Expressionist produced in 1980. The work brilliantly reveals the master at his most contemplative, subtly changing his technique and style in reaction to the ease with which he now felt painting in style of his works of the earlier 1970s. Here, de Kooning employs longer, crisper, broader brushstrokes which push the boundaries of his compositional constructions. The artist approached his canvas with new ribbon-like lightness, redeploying his previous styles in a revelatory novel way. As the art historian John Elderfield notes, here “the loosening of fit, and its consequences… was part of a perennial, alternating pattern of expansion and contraction, for the artist as natural as breathing” (de Kooning: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2011, p. 450).
Untitled I demarcates a bold new period which would mark the last decade of de Kooning’s artistic production. The artist had suffered several tribulations from 1978, where the loss of several close friends, including Tom Hess and Harold Rosenberg, coupled with the disastrous news that many of his earlier painting were in critical condition due to his experimental media, and his personal struggles with alcoholism, had a deleterious effect on his artistic output. 1980 inaugurated both personal and artistic breakthroughs—his newfound sobriety allowed de Kooning to begin to work again, finding renewed strength through his painterly practice as he rethought his creative methods. As he noted to the art patron Olga Hirshorn, “In [my] line of work… the very worse can turn out for the good” (quoted in J. Zilczer, A Way of Living: The Art of Willem de Kooning, New York, 2014, p. 227).
Untitled I is one of a few of what are known as the “impossible paintings” created in the late 1970s and early 1980s. De Kooning laid swathes of troweled white across the ground of his canvas, over which he marbled sweeping gestures of thalo green, cobalt, and orange, mingled with a shot of violet. Describing these “extraordinary paintings,” Elderfield eloquently elaborates how de Kooning’s colors “pulse and hover like the Northern Lights over a still pond. If jumping ship was his first big splash, de Kooning kept the water moving afterward. His paint handling spanned an encyclopedia of traditions. His imagery groped back to wide-eyed Isis. Bruegel and Cranach’s women come on board” (quoted in “John Elderfield, Jennifer Field, Lauren Mahony, and Delphine Huisinga with Phong Bui,” The Brooklyn Rail, December 2011–January 2012, online [accessed 4/14/2026]). De Kooning reengaged with the art historical tradition with renewed vigor, studying the techniques of the Old Masters while reconsidering their handling of color. Untitled I in particular recalls the style and color of the Venetian Renaissance artists, particularly Titian and Giorgione. As the scholar Stephen Mack writes, “many of the fundamental aspects of de Kooning’s art have their origins in Venetian artistic traditions. The Venetians, having devised novel ways of depicting landscapes in oil, invented the genre of the pastoral landscape in painting, an important historical precedent for de Kooning’s work of the 1960s and ‘70s” (“Willem de Kooning and the Venetian Renaissance,” in De Kooning and Italy, exh. cat., Galerie dell’Accademia, Venice, 2024, p. 51).
Thalo green is a notoriously difficult pigment to work with, proving nigh impossible to properly incorporate into chromatic harmony with other colors. De Kooning’s bold choice to foreground the color in Untitled I expresses the artist’s determined ambition as he entered his eighth decade. When he viewed his 1978 exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Willem de Kooning in East Hampton, de Kooning said to his assistant, “I can’t go wrong with these pictures” (quoted in ibid.). The artist undertook to reevaluate his painterly praxis, seeking new challenges in order to breathe a new vitality into his work. “I don’t have any convictions except my paintings,” the artist declared the year the present work was made (quoted in E. Lieber, Willem de Kooning: Reflections in the Studio, New York, 2000, p. 49).
Just because you’re getting old doesn’t mean you’re getting any better. But I have a feeling I can do it better now Willem de Kooning
Describing the new body of work which de Kooning debuted at the turn of the decade, Elderfield writes, “when compared with the many preceding abstractions, they reveal an increased use of the taper’s knife (the flat-bladed tool used in drywall construction to spread spackle over taped joints) to spread swaths of thick paint, now into discrete bands or ribbons of varying widths” (J. Elderfield, op. cit., p. 447). In employing the taper’s knife in his new body of work, de Kooning looked back to his younger self, rejuvenating the techniques he first mastered as a young artist newly arrived in New York. The Dutch artist had arrived in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1926, finding employment as a house and sign painter before moving into the city and befriending Arshile Gorky, John Graham, and Stuart Davis. His manipulation of the painted surface in Untitled I, using his knife to scrape away pigment, recapitulated his earliest work in the United States. As Judith Zilczer describes, “in the end, he would mine a lifetime of studio experience to craft a new painting process grounded in his graphic sensibility” (J. Zilczer, op. cit., p. 227).
The present work was exhibited in his longtime dealer Xavier Fourcade’s exhibition One Major New Work Each the year it was made, alongside work by the likes of Joan Mitchell, Roy Lichtenstein, and Louise Bourgeois. It was then featured the following year in the fifth Whitney Biennial, after which the work was acquired by the eminent Philadelphia art collector David Pincus. The Pincus collection included exceptional masterpieces of American postwar art, including important works by Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Barnett Newman, as well as deep holdings of de Kooning’s work. When the Pincus collection came to auction in 2012, records were broken for Pollock, Newman, and Rothko. Untitled I then ascended into an important European collection of abstract paintings, demonstrating the continued import of the work.
Untitled I ushers in the last decade of de Kooning’s celebrated oeuvre, revealing for the first time the fluid, ribbon-like brushstrokes which would coalesce into the lyrical abstractions of his late period. By utterly reducing his painterly style, seeking novel forms out from old ideas, de Kooning was able to successfully reinvent his practice, allowing him to emerge out from a creative and personal stupor which plagued the last years of the 1970s. Remarkable in its visual impact and astounding in its formal intelligence, the present work marks the last new beginning in de Kooning’s constantly metamorphosing practice. “It’s not going to be easy,” the artist wittily remarked to his interlocutor Judith Wolfe in the beginning of the decade. “Just because you’re getting old doesn’t mean you’re getting any better. But I have a feeling I can do it better now” (quoted in ibid., p. 232).