Willem de Kooning

One of the most impressive achievements of de Kooning’s prolific sixty year career was his ability to continually advance, refine and redevelop his painting style whilst maintaining an idiosyncratic fluidity of touch. Never content to settle into a stagnant, signature way of working, in the 1980s during the twilight of his career, de Kooning embarked upon a series of monumental Untitled compositions which provided the crowning achievement to his celebrated oeuvre.

Immediately sensual and exhilarating, the diaphanous fluidity of these late works is almost drawing like. The rhythmic suppleness of de Kooning’s wrist - that unmistakable touchstone of his best work – here carves its way across the composition in broad, flowing swathes of colour. Filtering the countless stylistic changes and compositions of the preceding decades into a radically distilled fusion of line and colour, here de Kooning channels his wealth of creative experience into the emotive construction of poetic form. Like Monet’s Water Lilies and Matisse’s Cut-Out’s - both executed in the final years of their artists’ respective careers - de Kooning’s Untitled paintings from the mid 1980s afford a late flowering of outstanding beauty and revelatory simplicity. Having struggled in a battle against severe alcoholism for much of the previous decade, with the help of his ex-wife Elaine from whom he had separated in 1955, de Kooning gave up drink in the 1980s and began to paint with renewed vigour and purpose. This dramatic resurgence of creative activity is captured in a series of intimate studio photographs of the artist taken by Edvard Lieber - his confidant, secretary and curator - which show the diligent de Kooning continually at work on the large, brightly coloured canvases lining his studio (fig. 1).

Off his diet of anti-depressants and no longer tormented by violent mood swings and long periods of lethargy, the grace and fertile optimism which swept into de Kooning’s new work marked a full break with the heavier impasto and sober palette of the previous decade. In their remarkable openness and linear freedom, these works surpass anything that he had attempted previously, dwarfing even the grand lyricism of his first black and white masterpieces of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Floating against a soft creamy white background, the physical, primary intensity of de Kooning’s abstract calligraphy pulls our gaze around the composition in a darting pattern of sweeping arcs and curves. Like the lily-pond-buoyancy of Matisse’s cut-outs, the contours and planes of the surface seem to rise out from the canvas and into our space.

Dispelling any notion of an artist in decline, these late, airy compositions emphatically reveal the mature master to be working in full flow at the height of his creative powers. The painterly chaos that had characterised much of his previous output gives way to a sharper, layered matrix of linear organic forms which flow freely into one another with supreme confidence and authority. The striking compositional and colouristic simplification witnessed in Untitled XXI affords the full evolution of a gradual process of reduction which de Kooning had begun in the late 1970s. The abstract forms of the preceding years are here larger and bolder; the surfaces of their sinuous lines less scrambled and tortured. To compliment the fluidity of these cascading lines, De Kooning opts for a more subdued and lyrical palette. Nowhere is his ability as a colourist more poetically asserted than in these late masterpieces.

The flatness and effortless aura of Untitled XXI in fact masks a lengthy history of habitual reworking. Dragging a wide metal edge through heavy masses of paint, de Kooning here turns scraping into a kind of drawing.  A process of subtraction becomes an addition in a stately flurry of draughtsmanly gestures. Almost impossible to reproduce, the infinite subtle hues and tensions within the ethereal, scraped-down paint surface reveal ghostly traces of the composition’s numerous preceding stages. Just as he had with the eradicated letters and words in his earliest paintings, de Kooning here gathered new forms and patterns from within the erased residues of previous paint layers as the composition grew towards its own ‘self-generating’ form. These past remnants act as an existential history of the artist’s struggle and give the delicate shades of white and yellow their lush surfaces and disarming depth and luminosity.

Unlike many of his Abstract expressionist colleagues who leaned towards monumental, mural-scaled works in their later careers, for the most part, de Kooning remained an easel painter. Preferring his chosen 70 by 80in. format for its relationship to the human body, de Kooning explained: “If I stretch my arms next to the rest of myself and wonder where my fingers are - that is all the space I need as a painter.” Untitled XXI's uplifting composition reveals an artist who has finally reached an enlightened balance between his mind, body and materials. It clarifies something of the vital character of his art and has the same qualities that had initially brought him renown as an Abstract Expressionist - an insistence on invention, freedom and risk. Just as de Kooning continually sought to renew the appearance of his art, here he also renews the existential issues at its very core.