.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
With its blue and red arabesques dancing through bright white space, Untitled (1984) is an elegant painting from Willem de Kooning’s triumphant late period. The artist worked with extraordinary energy during the 1980s, distilling the gestural and linear structures of his earlier abstract work into spare, luminous large-scale pictures. Here, sinuous lines of colour trace shapes that distantly echo figure and landscape. The lines are dynamic and distinct, variously swelling or tapering, sharply cornered or blurring into the surrounding white. Areas of red and blue glow beneath later layers like light through cloud. While drawing on aspects of his work from previous decades, the 1980s saw de Kooning arrive at a new and richly-worked clarity. ‘Particularly in the works from 1984,’ writes Gary Garrels, ‘the results are paintings of an openness and freedom not seen before, paintings that are extraordinarily lyrical, immediately sensual, and exhilarating’ (‘Three Toads in the Garden: Line, Colour and Form’, in Willem de Kooning: The Late Paintings, The 1980s, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 1996, p. 28).
Having made his name at the vanguard of Abstract Expressionism in post-war New York, de Kooning continually pushed his work in new directions. His seminal 1940s abstractions were followed by the infamous Woman series of the early 1950s, which—at once primal and profoundly modern—remain some of the defining images of twentieth-century art. After his 1963 move from Manhattan to East Hampton, Long Island, he embarked on more open, broad-brushed compositions that reflected his verdant surroundings, with female figures making a bucolic return. The 1970s saw him build up a still more fluid, variegated and heavily-worked impasto in works which drew upon the roiling Atlantic sea and sky. It was around 1981, thanks in part to the guidance of his wife Elaine, that the stripped-back majesty of the ‘late’ abstractions emerged. He would continue to work in this vein until the end of the 1980s.
De Kooning began each of these new paintings with a charcoal cartoon on white primed canvas. He would sift through sheafs of small drawings kept in his studio—mostly dating from the 1960s—to find inspiration. He often held a drawing, or a photograph of one, in his hand as he sketched its forms. At other times he would enlarge a drawing in charcoal on both sides of a large sheet of vellum, which he then used like tracing paper to transfer the line to canvas. Passages of different drawings could be reorientated and overlaid, reprising a method that de Kooning had used in his biomorphic 1940s compositions. He would also refer to other paintings in the studio: many works from 1984, including the present, can be seen to comprise suites of closely related form, with echoes from each work shaping its neighbour.
In the early years de Kooning had worked with a frenetic, obsessive intensity, subjecting canvases such as Woman I (1950-1952) to hundreds of sessions of overpainting, completion and revision. The 1980s were defined instead by fluency and freedom. Where the tight interlocking spaces and shallow figure-ground relationships of his earlier work had been informed by Picasso’s Cubism and the work of Paul Cezanne, he now sought the openness and simplicity seen in the compositions of Henri Matisse, referring to what he called the ‘floating quality’ of the latter’s Dance (I) (1909). De Kooning’s late works also evoke the rigour of the Dutch master Piet Mondrian, whose reduced palette and use of structural tension had fascinated him for decades. Many of the paintings, write Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swann, ‘look like a Mondrian reflected in rippling water’ (De Kooning: An American Master, New York, 2006, p. 601).
The apparent ease of these diaphanous, drawing-like compositions was achieved through a mastery of complex working methods. Following the charcoal cartoon, de Kooning would fill in forms and accentuate lines as he painted, constantly refining the overall structure. He would create shapes by masking areas of colour in white, or use charcoal again to clarify a line or transform a spatial relationship. One such stroke brackets the upper left of the present painting. The work’s surface also reveals its fine-tuning, shifting through smooth matte textures and a silken shimmer where the artist has sanded, painted over or blended wet pigments using his hand or a sheet of paper. ‘De Kooning was a classical painter in an anti-classical age’, writes Robert Storr. ‘The sinew of his art was traditional drawing endlessly adjusted to unstable volumes. Its flesh was pigment stretched to the limits of textural and chromatic self-definition’ (‘Last Light’, in Willem de Kooning: The Late Paintings, The 1980s, op. cit., p. 60). In the pared-back splendour of his late works, de Kooning went further than he had ever gone before.
Having made his name at the vanguard of Abstract Expressionism in post-war New York, de Kooning continually pushed his work in new directions. His seminal 1940s abstractions were followed by the infamous Woman series of the early 1950s, which—at once primal and profoundly modern—remain some of the defining images of twentieth-century art. After his 1963 move from Manhattan to East Hampton, Long Island, he embarked on more open, broad-brushed compositions that reflected his verdant surroundings, with female figures making a bucolic return. The 1970s saw him build up a still more fluid, variegated and heavily-worked impasto in works which drew upon the roiling Atlantic sea and sky. It was around 1981, thanks in part to the guidance of his wife Elaine, that the stripped-back majesty of the ‘late’ abstractions emerged. He would continue to work in this vein until the end of the 1980s.
De Kooning began each of these new paintings with a charcoal cartoon on white primed canvas. He would sift through sheafs of small drawings kept in his studio—mostly dating from the 1960s—to find inspiration. He often held a drawing, or a photograph of one, in his hand as he sketched its forms. At other times he would enlarge a drawing in charcoal on both sides of a large sheet of vellum, which he then used like tracing paper to transfer the line to canvas. Passages of different drawings could be reorientated and overlaid, reprising a method that de Kooning had used in his biomorphic 1940s compositions. He would also refer to other paintings in the studio: many works from 1984, including the present, can be seen to comprise suites of closely related form, with echoes from each work shaping its neighbour.
In the early years de Kooning had worked with a frenetic, obsessive intensity, subjecting canvases such as Woman I (1950-1952) to hundreds of sessions of overpainting, completion and revision. The 1980s were defined instead by fluency and freedom. Where the tight interlocking spaces and shallow figure-ground relationships of his earlier work had been informed by Picasso’s Cubism and the work of Paul Cezanne, he now sought the openness and simplicity seen in the compositions of Henri Matisse, referring to what he called the ‘floating quality’ of the latter’s Dance (I) (1909). De Kooning’s late works also evoke the rigour of the Dutch master Piet Mondrian, whose reduced palette and use of structural tension had fascinated him for decades. Many of the paintings, write Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swann, ‘look like a Mondrian reflected in rippling water’ (De Kooning: An American Master, New York, 2006, p. 601).
The apparent ease of these diaphanous, drawing-like compositions was achieved through a mastery of complex working methods. Following the charcoal cartoon, de Kooning would fill in forms and accentuate lines as he painted, constantly refining the overall structure. He would create shapes by masking areas of colour in white, or use charcoal again to clarify a line or transform a spatial relationship. One such stroke brackets the upper left of the present painting. The work’s surface also reveals its fine-tuning, shifting through smooth matte textures and a silken shimmer where the artist has sanded, painted over or blended wet pigments using his hand or a sheet of paper. ‘De Kooning was a classical painter in an anti-classical age’, writes Robert Storr. ‘The sinew of his art was traditional drawing endlessly adjusted to unstable volumes. Its flesh was pigment stretched to the limits of textural and chromatic self-definition’ (‘Last Light’, in Willem de Kooning: The Late Paintings, The 1980s, op. cit., p. 60). In the pared-back splendour of his late works, de Kooning went further than he had ever gone before.