Willem de Kooning

Estate of the artist
Private Collection

Seattle, Modern Art Pavillion, Seattle Art Museum, De Kooning: New Paintings and Sculpture, February - March 1976, cat. no. 24, illustrated (cast no. 4/7)
Los Angeles, James Corcoran Gallery, Willem de Kooning: Paintings, Drawings, Sculptures, May - June 1976, cat. no. 28 (cast no. 4/7)
Austin, University Art Museum, De Kooning: Lithographs, Sculpture and Painting, October - November 1976 (cast no. 5/7)
Houston, Sarah Campbell Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston, De Kooning: Recent Work, January - February 1977, cat. no. SC5 (cast number unknown)
Edinburgh, Fruitmarket Gallery; London, the Serpentine Gallery, The Sculptures of de Kooning With Related Paintings, Drawings and Lithographs, October 1977 - January 1978, cat. no. 21 (cast number unknown)
New York, Xavier Fourcade Inc., Willem de Kooning: the Complete Sculptures, 1983 (cast number unknown)
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Willem de Kooning/paintings, October 1994 - January 1995 (cast no. 3/7)
New York, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Willem de Kooning: Drawings and Sculpture, October - December 1998, pl. 61, illustrated in color (cast no. 4/7)
Stanford, Ca., Stanford University Museum of Art, extended loan, 1999 - 2002 (cast. no. AP 1/2)

Exh. Cat., Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, Willem de Kooning: Drawings and Sculpture, 1974, cat. no. 147, fig. no. 66, illustrated (cast number unknown)
Jane Bell, ``De Kooning's New Work'', Arts Magazine, no. 50, November 1975, p. 80, illustrated
Carter Ratcliff, ``Willem de Kooning'', Art International, no. 19, December 1975, p. 19, illustrated
Exh. Cat., West Palm Beach, Norton Gallery and School of Art, Willem de Kooning: Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, 1967-75, 1975, cat. no. 26, illustrated (cast number unknown)
Exh. Cat., Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Willem de Kooning: Sculptures and Lithographs, 1976, cat. no. SC21, illustrated (cast no. 3/7)
Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Willem de Kooning in East Hampton, 1978, cat. no. 95, illustrated (cast number unknown)
Exh. Cat., Cedar Falls, University of Northern Iowa Gallery of Art, de Kooning, 1969-1978, 1978, cat. no. 37, illustrated
Exh. Cat., Pittsburgh, Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Willem de Kooning: Pittsburgh International Series, 1979, cat. no. 126, p. 143, illustrated (cast number unknown)
Exh. Cat. , East Hampton, Guild Hall, Willem de Kooning: Works from 1951-1981, 1981, cat. no. 72, illustrated (cast number unknown)
Exh. Cat., Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Willem de Kooning: the North Atlantic Light, 1983, cat. no. 69, p. 110, illustrated (cast no. AP 2/2)
Exh. Cat., Cologne, Josef Haubrich Kunsthaller, Willem de Kooning: Sculptures, 1983, cat. no. 23, pp. 78-79, illustrated (cast number unknown)
Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Willem de Kooning: Drawings, Paintings, Sculptures, 1984, cat. no. 278, p. 262, illustrated (cast number unknown)
Exh. Cat., London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Willem de Kooning: Painting and Sculpture, 1971-1983, 1984, cat. no. 20, illustrated (cast. no. 1/7)
Jorn Merkert, ``Willem de Kooning: Le Plaisir de Realite'', Art Press, no. 82, June 1984, p. 8, illustrated (cast number unknown)
Mary Rose Beaumont, ``London/Willem de Kooning/Anthony D'Offay Gallery'', Arts Review, December 1984, n.p., illustrated (cast number unknown)
William Packer, ``Willem de Kooning/Anthony D'Offay Gallery: New York's Grand Old Man'', Financial Times, January 1985, n.p., illustrated (cast number unknown)
Janet Hobhouse, The Bride Stripped Bare/the Artist and the Nude in Twentieth Century, London, 1988, pl. 232, p. 258, illustrated in color (cast number unknown)
Philippe Sollers, De Kooning, Vite, volume II (Oeuvres), Paris, 1988, pl. no. 80, illustrated in color (cast number unknown)
Exh. Cat., New York, Matthew Marks Gallery, Willem de Kooning: Sculpture, 1996, cat. no. 23, p. 57, illustrated (cast number unknown)
Sally Yard, Willem de Kooning, New York, 1997, fig.no. 88, p. 103, illustrated (cast number unknown)
Exh. Cat., Zurich, Thomas Ammann Fine Arts, Willem de Kooning, 1999, cat. no. 8, illustrated in color (cast number unknown)
Exh. Cat., New York, C&M Arts, Willem de Kooning/Selected Paintings and Sculpture, 1964-1973, 2000, pl. 15, illustrated in color (cast no. 1/7)
Exh. Cat., Valencia, IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez, Willem de Kooning, 2001, p. 157, illustrated in color (cast no. 3/7)
Steven A. Nash, Carmen Gimenez and Michael Brenson, A Century of Sculpture: the Nasher Collection, Dallas, 2003, pp. 266-67, illustrated in color (cast no. 7/7)

Casts of Hostess are in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.

It was thanks to the personal encouragement of Henry Moore that de Kooning’s first tentative experiments with sculpture became a major artistic enterprise which, in the course of five years and with growing confidence, would produce a series of extraordinary works that rival his paintings in originality and scope. In the words of William Tucker: “De Kooning is the latest and … the last of the series of great painters whose occasional work in three dimensions has enriched and even transformed the sculpture of the modern period.” (“On the Sculpture” in Exh. Cat., New York, Matthew Marks Gallery, Willem de Kooning: Sculpture, 1996, p. 45)

While on holiday in Rome in 1969, de Kooning met Herzl Emanuel, a friend who had purchased a bronze foundry in Trastevere. De Kooning visited the foundry several times and produced a series of thirteen small and experimental clay sculptures. These were each cast in bronze in editions of six, and sent back to New York upon de Kooning’s return. Moore saw the thirteen sculptures in Xavier Fourcade’s Gallery, and encouraged de Kooning to start working on a more ambitious scale. De Kooning followed his advice, and for the next five years produced a series of larger works, as well as recasting on a much larger scale several of his first thirteen Roman models.

Hostess dates from 1973, and is one of the two largest indoor sculptures from the series along with Clamdigger. Stylistically, Hostess beautifully addresses de Kooning’s lifelong fascination for the female form. Knotted, curling clay seems to wind itself around her legs like sinews, while its surface reads like a map of the work’s creation: grooves and hollows where his fingertips have dug into the soft clay, smooth areas where his thumb has rubbed a trough or raised a crest. As Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan put it in their Pulitzer Prize winning biography of de Kooning, it’s “not just touch as it’s often defined in the art books, as something specifically fine that only a connoisseur can appreciate, but touch as the visceral act of pushing and squeezing and shaping” (Stevens and Swan, Willem de Kooning: An American Master, New York, 2004, p. 549).

We can see how the figure has been created, starting from the basic structure of the armature supporting the soft flesh of the sculpture, while de Kooning adds fistful after fistful of clay, its lumpish form slowly filling out into the completed work. This total visual memory of its creation gives the work a sense of continuing evolution, as if we might see further lumps slowly emerge from its surface, as the Hostess continues her journey of becoming.

Total engagement with the material – with the substance in his hands – is one of the most striking features of de Kooning’s entire oeuvre. The faithfulness to the nature of his material extends to his sculptures, where the clay retains its primal heaviness, its pliable softness – now become illusory in the bronze. As a way of moderating this intense relation with the material and to break established habits and gestures, de Kooning often painted and sculpted with his eyes closed or – especially in the larger sculptures such as Hostess – while wearing gloves. The gloves helped to expand his gesture, to make each tug, push and caress bolder and stronger.  

The figure of Hostess has her head thrown back as if laughing at a joke, or holding forth, lost in the sound of her own voice. The multiple arms and fingers, opening out and doubling back, capture gesticulating movements. The second set of arms anchor the wide expanses of the lower arms, which open out as if to welcome a new guest. The expressive character of this sculpture, its engaging humanity, is reflected in de Kooning’s decision to give it a name that expresses a personality, rather than the purely descriptive labels of most of his sculptures, such as Seated Woman on a Bench, Head or Cross-Legged Figure. In fact, it is tempting to see in the animated and smiling features of the Hostess a gently teasing portrayal of Emilie Kilgore, the charming and beautiful socialite who became de Kooning’s mistress during these years when she often brought the retiring de Kooning out of his isolation in his studio in East Hampton. Regardless of its subject, whether autobiographical or not, Hostess is one of the last and most accomplished sculptures that de Kooning made, and stands at the extraordinary climax of an adventure that was as brilliant as it was brief, the perfect extension of his painting into the solidity of a third dimension.