Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning 1904–1997

[no title] signed ‘de Kooning’ on the stretcher oil on canvas

223.5 x 195.6 cm (88 x 77 in.)

Painted in 1984.

Estimate

£7,000,000 – 9,000,000 ‡ plus Buyers Premium and VAT*

Provenance

Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG, Zurich

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Literature

Willem de Kooning: The Late Paintings, The 1980s, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Museum

Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1995, fig. 23, p. 27 (illustrated)

Willem de Kooning: Die Späten Gemälde, Die 80er Jahre, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, fig. 23, p. 31 (illustrated)

Willem de Kooning: De Late Schilderijen 1981 – 1987, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Museum

Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, fig. 23, p. 27 (illustrated)

Willem de Kooning, Thomas Ammann Fine Art, Zurich, 2003, no. 5, n.p. (illustrated)

Suffused 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.

Hans Namuth, photograph of Willem de Kooning in his studio, East Hampton, Long Island, working on Untitled XI, 1983. Image: © 1991 Hans Namuth Estate, Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Artwork: © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/ARS, NY and DACS, London 2023.

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 bever 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 market, having remained in this esteemed collection for over 20 years. Never before seen in public, 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

Julian 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, established 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.

Willem de Kooning, Untitled VII, 1983, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Image: Whitney Museum of American Art / Licensed by Scala, Artwork: © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/ ARS, NY and DACS, London 2023.

Arshile Gorky, Garden in Sochi, c. 1943, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Image: © The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

Willem de Kooning, Excavation, 1950, The Art Institute of Chicago. Image: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY/ Scala, Florence, Artwork: © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/ ARS, NY and DACS, London 2023.