The Women had to do with the female painted through the ages, all those idols.” – Willem de Kooning
Remaining in the Miles and Shirley Fiterman Collection for over thirty years, Untitled is an extraordinary example of Willem de Kooning’s skilled draughtsmanship in a rare large scale. Exploring the fine line between figuration and abstraction, this work depicts de Kooning’s iconic female nude, with which he was catapulted to fame in the 1950s. Swathes of thick, dark charcoal describe the contours of the woman’s body in rapid, expressive strokes, and the dynamic composition is enlivened by flashes of red and blue paint. Executed in 1964-1966, Untitled is exemplary of the stylistic shift in de Kooning’s practice that coincided with the artist’s move to the Hamptons in the 1960s. If de Kooning’s women from the 1950s appeared violent, now they became more relaxed, expansive and whimsical.
Although de Kooning exploits the expressive potential of spatial dislocations and juxtapositions that he perfected in the late 1940s and 1950s, the drawing is divested of the skull-like features and rigid geometry which often distinguished his earlier Women paintings. Lynn Cooke observes on the subject of de Kooning’s 1960s drawings: “As in Picasso’s graphic work, a far broader range of situations and moods is permitted. They seem to provide an outlet for the antics of de Kooning’s denizens as well as an occasional arena for rehearsing certain strategies for use later in the oil” (Lynn Cooke, “De Kooning and the Pastoral: The Interrupted Idyll", Willem de Kooning, exh. cat., Hirschhorn Museum Collection, Washington, D.C., p. 98). Composed of gestural curves, Untitled permeates a primal energy – its animalistic forms suggesting Hellenistic depictions of Bacchic frenzies. As de Kooning told an interviewer in the late 1960s, “Some of my earlier women are violent. They even scare me...The women I paint now are very friendly and pastoral, like my landscapes, and not so aggressive” (Willem de Kooning, quoted in David L. Shirey, “Art: Don Quixote in Springs”, Newsweek, December 20, 1967, p. 80).