“I try to free myself from the notion of top and bottom, left and right […] Everything should float.”
—Willem de KooningSuffused with radiant light and the gentle fluctuations of line and colour, this profoundly lyrical and harmonious untitled work belongs to Willem de Kooning’s celebrated last great cycle of paintings. A remarkable body of work, lauded by Robert Storr as ‘the most distinctive, graceful, and mysterious de Kooning himself ever made’, these delicate visions carry us into the vast, airy spaces where ideas and poetry thrive, their forms mutable and effervescent.ⁱ

Although at first glance appearing in stark contrast to the violent, gestural energy, heavy impasto, and distortive approach to form adopted in the 1950s and developed across his infamous Women canvases, in the clarity of their structure these luminous compositions retain the formal consistency and emotional depth of the artist’s earlier work. Such connections not only speak to the internal coherence of his restlessly experimental oeuvre but, more pointedly, illuminate the constant, fluid exchanges between figuration and abstraction from which his paintings emerged.

 

Distilled to the essence of line and colour, the present work’s supple forms bend and pirouette against the luminous and remarkably subtle white tonalities beneath, weightless ribbons of soft reds, butter yellow, and electric blue unspooling across its expansive surface. Fluid and shifting, these late works crystalise the dance between figuration and abstraction that best define de Kooning’s remarkably inventive 60-year career, highlighting the extent to which he never truly abandoned the figure, even as he pushed abstraction into radically new territory.

 

Acquired  by visionary collector Marcel Brient, this painting is completely fresh to auction, having remained in this esteemed collection for over 20 years. This ethereal piece is an exceptional example of one of de Kooning’s most highly regarded bodies of work, its human scale the largest format that this relentlessly innovative artist worked on during this period.

 

Finding Balance

 

Born to working class parents in Rotterdam in 1904, the Dutch de Kooning stowed away on a ship bound for the United States in 1926, writing himself into history as a defining force of American abstraction and one of the most significant artists of the 20th century. Like many in his position, de Kooning left a war-shattered Europe to pursue a new life in this fabled land of opportunity, meeting the energy and bravura demonstrated by an emerging generation of American artists with a deep and nuanced sense of his connection to European painting and avant-garde tradition.

 

While de Kooning carried this knowledge with him to America, by the 1930s, New York was also establishing itself as a thriving artistic centre. Alongside the access to European artists made possible by New York based dealers such as Pierre Matisse and Julien Levy, major institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art mounted a series of important exhibitions throughout the 1930s focused on the conceptual and aesthetic roots of Cubism alongside retrospectives of the two great titans of European modern art - Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. While the raw immediacy of Picasso’s Cubistic fragmentation of form clearly held sway over de Kooning’s energetic and often provocative approach to figuration in the 1950s, it would be more the deeper lessons in spatial construction taken from Picasso’s canvases that allowed de Kooning to continue to adapt and refine his painterly language well into the 1980s.

 

Like the Armenian émigré Arshile Gorky, who the younger painter developed a strong attachment to after their first meeting in 1928, de Kooning eagerly absorbed these lessons. Searching for ways to move beyond the accepted paradigms set by the European avant-garde in the early decades of the 20th century, he quickly refined the gestural marks and expressive elan that would come to define his own mode of Abstract Expressionism in the coming years. Infusing the ‘clustered biomorphism’ advanced by Gorky with a sense of spatial coherence gleaned from the likes of Picasso and Cézanne, de Kooning blended a Surrealist excavation of the unconscious with rigorous pictorial logic, establishing an openness in his practice that allowed for near-constant reassessment and reconsideration, as evident in his early enamel paintings as it is in these late, great works.ⁱⁱ

While literary modernism’s debt to the French poetry of the fin de siècle including Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal and the powerful Symbolism developed by Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé is self-evident, its relationship to painterly experiment, especially as it took root in mid-century America is perhaps less immediately obvious. Exalting imagination, the concrete image and the power of language, Symbolism’s influence on interwar Surrealism and its privileging of sharp juxtaposition to explore the logic of dreams and the unconscious can readily be traced in the painterly languages developed by artists such as Max Ernst and René Magritte, but it would also find its way into the monumental, heroic mode of painting most frequently associated with Abstract Expressionism. Infusing art with emotion and shifting between voluptuous, figurative curves and glimpses of landscape forms, de Kooning’s late works continue this legacy, distilling his painting down to the fundamental principles of line and colour, these lyrical works move us towards something more ineffable than the concrete image itself could express.

 

Transitions: the 1980s

"I wanted to get in touch with nature. Not painting scenes from nature, but to get a feeling of that light that was very appealing to me, [in East Hampton] particularly...It would be very hard for me now to paint any other place but here."
—Willem de KooningHaving previously been identified primarily as an urban painter, in 1963 de Kooning moved permanently to the flat, light-filled coast of East Hampton where he embraced the natural landscape around him, integrating its forms and subtle modulations of diffused light and colour into his canvases. Having overcome a period of debilitating illness with the help of his estranged wife Elaine, the paintings of the 1980s represent a triumphant return to form, those created in the intensely productive period between 1983 and '85 especially breath-taking in their ethereal lightness and sparse precision.

 

While the symbiotic relationship between painting and drawing was always evident in de Kooning’s practice, this would become even more pronounced after 1980, with drawing emerging once again as the guiding principle in his compositions. Stripping back all unnecessary detail to the bare essentials of line and colour, the present work is highly emblematic of this shift, advancing the ‘new kind of painting, or perhaps new kind of drawing’ that critic and curator Thomas B. Hess first identified in de Kooning’s black and white abstractions from the 1940s.ⁱⁱⁱ

 

As the recollections of his studio assistants attest, by 1983 de Kooning had in fact stopped working on paper almost entirely, instead treating ‘the paintings themselves in a manner more directly analogous to drawing.’^iv Working directly on the canvas surface, de Kooning first traced or sketched a cartoon in charcoal before interacting more directly with these contours, adjusting or accentuating them in an almost calligraphic manner with the help of brushes and flat palette knives in fluid, sweeping motions. Along with heavy impasto and mixed media elements, de Kooning also abandoned the whipped bowls of fluid emulsions that his paintings had previously employed, choosing instead to mix paints straight from the tube on a glass palette. This shift in technical approach in the mixing and application of his paints allowed the artist to create smoother, more translucent surfaces, manipulating and even sanding back passages to the extent that he elevated ‘scraping into a kind of drawing […] a stately flurry of draftsmanly gestures.’^v

 

“Through the scraper he can bleed the pigmented ribbons, cut them off, bury them under white, or almost erase them to a whisper. It’s the most satisfying sensation to paint fluid white paint into a stronger pigment or vice versa with a soft housepainter’s brush. […] White paint becomes the carrier of space. He tries to give form to nothingness.”
—Jenny SavilleAbsorbing the light and colour of his beloved East Hampton surroundings, de Kooning reduced his palette to smooth, tonal whites and primary shades of yellow, reds, and blues: the ‘bare essentials of painting […] the bases you can potentially mix everything from’ as British artist Jenny Saville has enthused.^vi Elemental and poetic, the dance of these ‘indescribable tones’ against the nuanced white passages in the present work generates an energetic conflation of figure and ground, making de Kooning’s delicate yet muscular lines appear to dance, weightless in space.^vii In their reduced palette, and strong rhythmic qualities these late works have frequently drawn comparison to Matisse’s Danse works, although it is in the languorous spirit, flattened pliant line and chromatic brilliance of a lyrical painting like lyrical Le bonheur de vivre that the present work finds the deepest resonance.

 

The artist himself noted the connection in his final years, conceding to his studio assistant Tom Ferrara that he had finally allowed himself to be influenced by the French master and the rhythmic, ‘floating quality’ that he associated with his work. Like de Kooning, Matisse also enjoyed a productive and inspired late cycle of works dominated by his celebrated cut-outs, and it was the reminder that Matisse was already well into his seventies when he began work on the cycle of works for the Chapel in Vence that ultimately led to de Kooning accepting his own commission for a triptych to be installed in St. Peter’s Church in New York towards the close of 1984.

 

Although the work would never make it to St. Peters, the commission allowed de Kooning to experiment with connecting his compositions, extending a principle that is already apparent in the suite of paintings completed earlier that year to which the present work belongs. Each internally coherent, the artist’s rapid movement between canvases nevertheless established a strong sense of continuity throughout this body of work. Possessing something of the quality of musical composition, forms repeat and recur like leitmotifs across these canvases, carried forward by de Kooning’s strong, supple arabesques, which seem to concentrate decades of painting into the finest of gestures. As Gary Garrels has suggested, ‘extraordinarily exuberant, celebratory, and life-affirming […] the triptych reveals the closely interwoven seriality of many of de Kooning’s paintings from this period and clarifies one of the crucial shifts between the paintings of the 1980s and earlier periods.’^viii

 

Confounding simple dichotomies of figure and landscape, in these masterful late paintings, de Kooning reasserted the fundamental fluidity that defined his practice, performing ‘a daring elision of abstract and figurative imagery that few of his contemporaries could fathom.’^ix Tellingly, it was a poet who immediately grasped this dance between oppositions at the very outset of de Kooning’s career. Before his tragically untimely death in 1966 New York School poet, curator, and art critic Frank O’Hara had been a vocal champion of de Kooning’s painting, finding in it a visual analogue for the energy and expansive scope that he was searching for in his own poems. At once delicate and muscular, de Kooning’s untitled work breaks new ground, the artist still ‘hewing a clearing / in the crowded abyss of the West’ well into his final, triumphant years.^x

 

ⁱ Robert Storr, quoted in Gary Garrels, ‘Three Toads in the Garden: Line, Colour, and Form’, in Willem de Kooning, The Late Paintings, The 1980s (exh. cat.), San Francisco, 1995, p. 28.
ⁱⁱ David Anfam, ‘An Unending Equation’, in Abstract Expressionism (exh. cat.), London, 2016, p. 21.
ⁱⁱⁱ Thomas B. Hess, quoted in Diane Waldman, Willem de Kooning in East Hampton (exh. cat.), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1978, p. 24. 
^iv Gary Garrels, ‘Three Toads in the Garden: Line, Colour, and Form’, in Willem de Kooning, The Late Paintings, The 1980s (exh. cat.), San Francisco, 1995, p. 24. 
^v Carter Ratcliff, ‘Willem de Kooning and the Question of Style’, in Willem de Kooning: The North Atlantic Light, 1960-1983, Amsterdam, 1983, p. 22. 
^vi Jenny Saville, quoted in Karar Vander Weg, ‘Jenny Saville on Willem de Kooning’, Gagosian Quarterly, April 13 2018, online. 
^vii Willem de Kooning, quoted in Harold Rosenberg, ‘Interview with Willem de Kooning’, Art News, 71, September 1972. 
^viii Gary Garrels, ‘Three Toads in the Garden: Line, Colour, and Form’, in Willem de Kooning, The Late Paintings, The 1980s (exh. cat.), San Francisco, 1995, p. 30.
^ix Judith Zilczer, A Way of Living: The Art of Willem de Kooning, London, 2014, p. 
^x Frank O’Hara, ‘Ode to Willem de Kooning’, 1957.