威廉‧杜庫寧

威廉．杜庫寧身後，紐約
私人收藏
高古軒畫廊，紐約
私人收藏（1999年購自上述人士處）

This painting is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art department at 212-606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is framed under Plexiglas in a dark wood frame with a float as is seen in the catalogue illustration.
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In every decade of his long and illustrious career, Willem de Kooning kept a firm grip on his medium as his muse. The glories of paint exhibited in works such as Untitled from 1970-1974 are quintessential de Kooning, whose wrist, arm or entire body became one with the rhythms of his brush. The vibrant color palette, fluid brushwork and compositional inventiveness are hallmarks of de Kooning's genius for oscillating between figuration and abstraction with a fluidity matched by few others except for the other Colossus of Twentieth Century art, Pablo Picasso. De Kooning's independent spirit infused his paintings with a heroic quality redolent of individualism rather than conformism. He was at heart a pluralist who reveled in the multi-dimensional and multi-thematic in all his works. Like Picasso, de Kooning was resistant to restricting his oeuvre to one style or one movement. Instead he was a master of synthesis and inclusiveness and his paintings of the late 1960s and 1970s are a testament to his ability to forge his own path toward a painterly sublime. Created after de Kooning had relocated from the urban tumult of Manhattan streets to the open landscape of Springs, Long Island, Untitled 1970-1974 captures the renaissance of de Kooning's sensory joy in the act of painting. Moving away from the communal artistic existence in New York City that had fostered his breakthrough years of the 1940s and culminated with the Woman and Landscape series of the 1950s, de Kooning now sought reflective contemplation rather than the aggressive assertiveness seen in Woman I (1950-1952, Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York) or Gotham News (1955, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo). The paintings of the 1960s and 1970s such as Untitled are instead languorous and luxurious interludes of sun, nature, flesh and paint.

The paintings of the early half of the 1960s, such as the masterful Woman, Sag Harbor (1964) and Woman (1964-1965), both in the collection of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, are quite simply celebrations of the artist's new environment that reminded him so strongly of his native Netherlands. The flat open terrain of Long Island, the brilliant sunlight, undulating dunes with swaying sea grass, the limpid waterscape and sunbathing populace are all the driving energy behind the re-emergence of a potent female figuration. While Woman, Sag Harbor displays the iconic toothy smile of de Kooning's Women of the 1950s, here color becomes brighter and brushstrokes broader as de Kooning's woman is now a creature of splayed limbs and more evident sexuality. Yet by the time of Montauk III (1969, Private Collection), de Kooning's figurative allusions are once again melding provocatively back into his landscape ground: hints of a co-existence of genres exist in the soft fleshy tones and the vaguely sculptural contours of the dissolving figure in the upper right. Despite its eponymous title alluding to the Montauk area of Long Island, this painting is one of de Kooning's ultimate hybrids, bridging his great aesthetic paradigms.

For the 1993-1995 exhibition of Willem de Kooning's works in the Hirshhorn Museum collection, Lynne Cooke penned an essay titled "De Kooning and the Pastoral: The Interrupted Idyll" which dealt specifically with this particular period of fluctuation between the genres of figuration and landscape, all through the prism of de Kooning's love for the Long Island scenery and the revival of his painterly focus. "In the later 1960s the emphasis on the body as flesh in de Kooning's art reached its apogee. Often faces are eliminated and breasts and genitals become unidentifiable. The figure is composed from wide brush strokes that sweep across the form in long trails and arabesques, making the body palpable. Carter Ratcliff eloquently characterized the process by which forms become more tangible than legible - more comprehensible to the touch than to the eye - as a "physicalization of visual sensation." The deflecting of attention from the figure to the landscape in the oils of the 1970s is achieved in part by enlarging the area devoted to the natural world, in part by enhancing its color, and in part by establishing a textural uniformity across the whole surface. In the works from this decade, de Kooning's equation of the erotic with an immersion in bodily matter is taken one stage further, so that the subject seems to be less the human figure itself than those life-affirming qualities of sensuality and sexuality that it might embody." (Lynne Cooke in Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Willem de Kooning from the Hirshhorn Museum Collection, 1993, pp. 104-105).

Untitled from 1970-1974 is the apotheosis of this phase of de Kooning's canon. While the artist had taken a short period of abstinence from painting in the late 1960s, his sculptural output that began in 1969, revived de Kooning's love for the tactile properties of artistic mediums, whether in malleable clay or luscious oil. Similar to the heavily modeled surfaces of his sculptures, such as the masterpiece of this group, Clam Digger 1972), de Kooning returned to paint's emphasis on texture, allowing a variety of planes to coalesce in and out of each other across the glorious paintings of the 1970s. Untitled dates from this rebirth of painterly verve. Its enveloping and impressive scale, as well as its insistent verticality, is reminiscent of Woman, Sag Harbor and the so-called "Door Paintings" of 1964 which heightened de Kooning's focus on single-figure formats at that time. Here the red and pink palette of Untitled, disseminated broadly across the canvas and intermingled with the greens and blues of the seaside, attests to the fracturing of the single-figure centrality of those earlier works. Instead, de Kooning had progressed to a period where "the female body now takes on the scale of the countryside. Although the gender of the figure is not distinguished in the title, what was implicit in certain earlier works is now out in the open: the curvature of the landscape is the curviness of the breasts, buttocks, or both. In place of the long tradition of identifying the female body with the landscape as mother earth, de Kooning focuses on flesh made available in an arcadian realm..." (Ibid., p. 105).

As the figure dissolves in Untitled from 1970-1974, the eroticism is visceral rather than manifestly overt, related to the overall sensory pleasures of the warm golden sunlight of summer, the shimmer of colors in a watery landscape or in the luxuriant application of pink fleshy paint. The overall "arcadian" mood or tone of the painting expresses contentment with the process of painting and a glorification of the environment depicted.  De Kooning has created a glorious genre of painting that is an organic mix of pure sensation.