Willem De Kooning

Xavier Fourcade, New York
Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago
Acquired by the present owner from the above in May 1987

Chicago, Richard Gray Gallery, Willem de Kooning The New Paintings, May – June 1987

This painting is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at 212-606-7254 for a condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is framed in a metal strip frame with a float.
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Polychrome tracery and sheer white meet in tender interplay between strength and sensuality in Willem de Kooning's Untitled VII, a late career masterpiece from the last decade of the painter's extraordinary sixty year career.  The present work is the embodiment of the tranquility and confidence de Kooning possessed in the twilight of his oeuvre – one that is marked with bursts of creativity and varied aesthetic choices.  Throughout de Kooning's diverse body of work, the artist's fluidity of stroke and gift of draftsmanship remains the constant and the work of the 1980s is no exception. In Untitled VII, the gradual reduction of his energetic painterly expression has allowed de Kooning to re-channel and concentrate his considerable creative intensity into a subtler, more evocative construction of poetic form.  Through the grand physicality of his brushstrokes and the bold intensity of his palette, in this case vibrant yellow and pulsating orange contrasted with cool blue, the artist has reached a synthesis of sign and background that becomes almost tangible.

The new balance and optimism in the 1980s paintings mark a crowning achievement of de Kooning's celebrated oeuvre.  By the middle of the decade, the artist was spending a majority of his time in the calm of East Hampton, New York – a landscape that brought grace and fertility to his painting. Unrestrained yet deliberate, the painting dazzles the viewer with musical vitality, "the last decade of de Kooning's painting clarifies something of the vital character of his art: his insistence on invention, freedom and risk.  These are the same qualities that had brought renown to him as an Abstract Expressionist.  In the 1980s de Kooning renewed their meaning as he renewed his vision of his own art.  The old existentialist issues that have surrounded de Kooning's work now appear all the more relevant, transformed as the paintings of the 1980s are from the paintings of the 1940s and 1950s." (Gary Garrels, in Exh. Cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Willem de Kooning: The Late Paintings, 1980s, 1995, p. 34)  As seen in the present work, the composition has been radically simplified from the aggressive and frenetic pace and structure of the abstract compositions of 1960s and 1970s.  The colors possess luminosity and the lines a diaphanous rhythm.  Untitled VII is a breathtaking example of the ability of the artist to give life and separation to his bold colors through line and shape as they emerge from the sun-dappled swaths of white.  In this series, de Kooning would often paint over and scrape away areas on the canvas, allowing ghostly pattern and color to occasionally come through the negative pictorial space of the white areas of paint.

Much like the late work of Pablo Picasso or Henri Matisse, de Kooning's late paintings contain the sustained energy and technical finesse of earlier achievements, as he returned to the grandly lyrical manner of de Kooning's Cubist abstractions in black and white of the 1940s.  However, filtered through the experiences and paintings of the intervening decades, the content of these paintings has radically changed.  The ethereal spaces have a peaceful serenity to them.  De Kooning became interested in the absence of things in the traces of what once was.  Like the late cutouts of Henri Matisse, de Kooning had a new process of creation and focused on unadulterated colors and contour lines.  The planes that float through the misty white canvas evoke the same refinement, buoyancy and liquidity as Matisse's Mimosa from 1949-1951.  Using his spatula to strip paint from the canvas, the thinned glossy impressions left behind emphasized the plasticity of the medium and the importance of subtraction in the process of creation.  With a parallel focus on sensual linearity and the simplification of form, the two artists demonstrate a similar tendency to reduce forms to their essence, to subtract until one is left with only the heart and soul.

Onto the soft white background of Untitled VII, as tall and wide as the span of de Kooning's outstretched arms, the artist has floated abstract and calligraphic brush strokes.   The viewer cannot help but to be enveloped with its tactile surface and visual plentitude achieved by an artist that has reached a serene relationship between his body, the paint and the canvas.  All previous signs of internal struggle in the artist's earlier work have disappeared, and as Robert Storr explains, "he was trying to simplify, to concentrate on something he was best at, which is drawing.  He had a warm, a cool, and a white.  He knew his days were dwindling and he was propelled.  He was not struggling.  He wasn't trying to prove anything.  He was just doing.  It became like breathing.  He just breathed them out." (Ibid, p. 53)