Warhol’s Liz
Painted at the pinnacle of Elizabeth Taylor’s fame, Liz is a unique variation from a group of thirteen colourful portraits of the actress produced in the fall of 1963. Rarely viewed in public, the present Liz is an outstanding example of Warhol’s genius for colour and is closely related to his Marilyn ‘flavours’ paintings executed in the previous year – which were named after their vibrant candy colours. Full article >

 Family Album
Lucian Freud paints those with whom he is familiar, with whom he has relationships -- lovers, friends and family -- and this fills his pictures with their unique, heady atmosphere, their meaty existentialism, their searing insights into the lives and emotions of the subjects and the artist himself. Lucian Freud’s portrait of his daughter Ib and her husband is one of intimacy and familial insight. Full article >

War on Taste
Jeff Koons is a great paradox, using humorous means for serious ends, trying to improve the quality of life of his viewers. This is edification through entertainment. Koons is waging a one-man war on taste; on the restrictions that he feels it imposes upon our lives. And Fait d’hiver, executed in 1988, and Diamond (Blue), from 2005-06, are clearly weapons used in this assault. Full article >

Tragedy, Ecstasy, Doom: The Art of Mark Rothko
In the early 1950s Rothko first made his great breakthrough to this way of painting and first established this Dionysian/Apollonian dialogue of grid-like coloured rectangles. ‘This kind of design may look simple,’ he said, ‘but it usually takes me many hours to get the proportions and colours just right. Everything has to lock together. I guess I am pretty much a plumber at heart’. Full article >
 Royalty, heroes and the streets
These were the themes that Basquiat stated lay at the centre of his art, and they are all clearly present in Untitled (Black Figure) and Sugar Ray Robinson. Painted in 1982, the year that Basquiat claimed he created his ‘best paintings ever’, these pictures combine the artist’s expressive, expressionistic brushwork, a legacy from his days as one half of the graffiti partnership SAMO only a couple of years earlier. Full article >

The Water Gazer
In 1977, the year in which de Kooning created Untitled XXIII, the artist’s favourite pastime was to cycle from his house in the Springs, Long Island, out to Louse Point. There, he would spend an hour or so silently contemplating the surface of the sea. ‘There is something about being in touch with the sea that makes me feel good, he told his friend Harold Rosenberg. 'That's where most my paintings come from even when I made them in New York.’ Full article >

The vivacious & the violent
At certain key moments in an artist’s career, a confluence of forces can come together to breathe special life into their art. Such salient moments of artistic vitality are aptly illustrated in three important Abstract Expressionist paintings: Thaw by Lee Krasner; Atlantic Side by Joan Mitchell; and Untitled XVII by Willem de Kooning. Full article >

The light of day
A diverse array of masterworks created in a variety of media are the highlights in the Post-War & Contemporary Art morning and afternoon sales. Featured are A Figure 4 on an Elegy by Robert Motherwell; Late September by Philip Guston; Woman in Landscape by Willem de Kooning; and Self-portrait (Fright Wig) by Andy Warhol. Full article >
 


The Water Gazer

A 1970s masterpiece by de Kooning

All his life, the Dutch-born artist Willem de Kooning, who, for much of the latter half of the 20th century became America's 'greatest living painter', was a 'water-gazer'. These were the Manhattanites in Hermann Melville's Moby Dick who found themselves, almost unconsciously, migrating to the edge of the town in order to gaze in reverie at the ocean.

In 1977, the year in which de Kooning created Untitled XXIII, the favourite pastime of this seventy-three year old immigrant artist was to cycle from his house in the Springs, Long Island, out to Louse Point. There, he too, would spend an hour or so silently contemplating the surface of the sea and its fluid ever-changing play of light shimmering under the sky.

'There is something about being in touch with the sea that makes me feel good, he told his friend Harold Rosenberg. 'That's where most my paintings come from even when I made them in New York.'

Untitled XXIII is one of the last of the great series of paintings that de Kooning made in a sudden burst of activity in the mid-1970s. These paintings, like much of his work, were born of such water-gazing and of de Kooning's unique view of reality as being a similar shimmering flux of form only truly perceivable through what he once famously described as a 'slipping glimpse'.

For this reason, and like the skin of the sea, which held such a mesmerizing power over him, surface is the key element in all of de Kooning's work. Everything that goes on in a de Kooning painting, every gesture, inflection, smudge, splash, twist, turn and halting point, takes place overtly in full view, right there on the surface for all to see.

Nothing is hidden or submerged, there appears to be no patient build-up or pre-meditation, no modeling or craft, only a constantly shifting ebb and flow of paint establishing its own unique identity on the flat surface of the canvas support.

Like Heraclitus' river, (a unity of chaotic flow), randomness and flux seem held together in de Kooning's extraordinarily fluid painting, by an innate but indecipherable ordering principle. In the same way that Heraclitus observed that, one could never step into the same river twice, no two de Koonings are ever alike either.

Despite the epic scale of his vision, de Kooning's art was, because of the way in which it was made, always founded on a profoundly human and even personal scale.

Filtered through the artist's physical response to his medium, inevitably de Kooning's paintings can only express the very human scale of the artist himself immersed in this shifting landscape of light and fluidity and are powerfully corporeal. This is one of the reasons why the artist was never really a purely abstract painter. In Untitled XXIII this corporeality is conveyed not just through the fierce physicality of de Kooning's sweeping and meandering line, but also through the rich fleshy tones and deep red hues of his paint.

Seemingly returning to a theme that had permeated his work of the 1960s and early 1970s, there are hints of a female figure in a landscape discernible in this work, her naked fleshy form mirroring that of a painting such as The Visit of 1966-7 as well as some of his more recent sculptures.

Amid the fleeting glimpses and suggestions of physical form, the figure, landscape, and the viewer's own gaze, all merge into one another, each becoming a part of a shimmering surface that is animated and enlivened by the dramatic sea of de Kooning's magisterial brushwork. Clashing, splashing, dripping, coagulating and merging in a spectacular cascade of flowing material, de Kooning's fluid colours tumble and crash over the surface of the painting like waves against rocks, foaming and bubbling, building and subsiding in an energetic physical play that is seemingly without beginning or end.

This article was provided by Christie's Post-War & Contemporary Art Department, New York