Transitions: the 1980s

Having 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 unessential 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

Absorbing 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, recalling the flattened, pliant line and chromatic brilliance of Henri Matisse’s early canvases such as the lyrical Le bonheur de vivre vii

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 breaks new ground, de Kooning 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 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.

Question of Style’, in Willem de Kooning: The North Atlantic Light, 1960-1983, Amsterdam, 1983, p. 22.

Willem de Kooning, Untitled (Triptych), 1985, Gift of Donald and Bettina Bryant, Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri.

Image: © Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri, USA / Bridgeman Images, Artwork: © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/ARS, NY and DACS, London 2023.

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