Willem De Kooning

Estate of the artist
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
Private Collection, United States
Sotheby's, New York, November 12, 2003, Lot 23
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Seoul, Gallery Seomi, Willem de Kooning: 1967 - 1997, August - September 2002, pg. 14, illustrated in color and illustrated in color on the cover

Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art (and travelling), Willem de Kooning Paintings, 1994, fig. 1, pg. 196, illustrated (in a photograph of the artist painting Untitled XLVIII in his studio, 1983)

This work is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at 212-606-7254 for a condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. This work is framed in a white wood strip frame.
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Willem de Kooning's Untitled XLVIII from 1983 emphatically reveals the mature artist working in full flower at the height of his creative powers.  Onto the massive pristine white background of Untitled XLVIII, as tall and wide as the span of de Kooning's outstretched arms, the artist has floated a series of delicate lines and planes that evoke the influence of Matisse's abstract cutouts, with their use of pure colors and elegant contour lines. The buoyant graceful lines of de Kooning's abstract calligraphy are utterly sensual, seemingly free from any specific reference to human or landscape subjects that dominated de Kooning's work of the prior five decades.  To compliment the fluidity of these cascading lines, de Kooning opted for a reduced and lyrical palette.  Nowhere is his ability as a colorist more poetically asserted than in these late masterpieces.

Describing de Kooning's technique in his late paintings, Carter Ratcliff observed: "Something extraordinary happens in the 1980s. Dragging a wide metal edge through heavy masses of paint, de Kooning turns scraping into a kind of drawing. A process of subtraction makes an addition, a stately flurry of draftsmanly gestures. De Kooning has always layered and elided his forms. Now he reminds us that he does the same with his methods." (Carter Ratcliff, "Willem de Kooning and the Question of Style", in Willem de Kooning: The North Atlantic Light, 1960-1983, Amsterdam, 1983, p. 22) The present work envelops the viewer with its tactile surface and vibrant gestural lines, creating an image of visual plenitude, showing an artist that has reached a serene relationship between his body, the paint and the canvas.  Immediately physical and exhilarating, the diaphanous fluidity and rhythmic suppleness of de Kooning's wrist here carves its way across the composition in broad flowing swathes of vibrant red and rich yellow. De Kooning channeled his wealth of creative experience into emotive construction by filtering the countless stylistic changes and compositions of the preceding decades into a radically distilled fusion of line and color.

Much like the late work of Pablo Picasso, de Kooning's late paintings contain the sustained energy and technical finesse of earlier achievements, and return to the grandly lyrical manner of de Kooning's Cubist abstractions of the 1940s. The compositions of the 1980s such as Untitled XLVIII are extremely sympathetic with the biomorphic silhouettes of the black and white abstractions such as Orestes (1947), and the color palette bears a resemblance to the acidic yellows, oranges and reds of works such as Fire Island (1946). However, filtered through the experiences and paintings of the intervening decades, most notably the sun and light-filled East Hampton landscapes, the content of these paintings has been radically simplified and illuminated, their composition distilled into pure color and line. The frenetic pace of the works of the 1940s gives way to a more layered and contemplative matrix of linear and organic forms executed with confidence and authority.  The composition is almost a magnification of a detail of the earlier works, now expanding beyond the edge of the canvas surface.

Despite the nominally abstract nature of his work from the 1980s, the initial markings often belonged to the human figure.  De Kooning was often uncomfortable when faced with a blank canvas and would quickly mark it and cover it to begin a pictorial structure.  In the works from the 1980s de Kooning would use these markings as the raw material for reorientations and displacements and painted select linear motifs to emphasize and define them.  As the paintings approached completion he tended to reduce the number of colors and lines and used large quantities of white to form simple ground planes that molded the chromatic colors (of red and yellow for instance) into distinctive forms.  It is difficult for the viewer to distinguish if the white is enclosing the colors or vice versa.  Untitled XLVIII'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.