T
his November, Sotheby’s is honored to present de Kooning | Decades: Property from the de Kooning Family Collection, a group of three extraordinary masterworks from three decades of Willem de Kooning’s oeuvre.
Each dating from the culmination of a decade, Montauk II (1969), Untitled (c. 1979) and The Hat Upstairs (1987) independently mark transformative moments for Willem de Kooning; together, they reveal the development of the artist’s practice from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, constituting an elegant retrospective across three decades.
All three works were painted in de Kooning’s self-designed home and studio in East Hampton – a deeply influential and private, rarely-seen oasis where the artist lived and worked starting in the 1960s until his death in 1997. In advance of the auction, take a tour of Willem de Kooning’s home and studio in Springs, East Hampton.
