Willem De Kooning

Xavier Fourcade, Inc., New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in December 1979

New York, Xavier Fourcade, De Kooning - New Paintings, October - November 1977
Bridgeport, Museum of Art, Science and Industry, 15^th Annual Fairfield Arts Festival: Artist of the Year, June 1978
Cedar Falls, Iowa, University of Northern Iowa; St. Louis, St. Louis Art Museum; Cincinnati, Contemporary Arts Center; Akron, Akron Art Institute, De Kooning: 1969 - 1978, October 1978 -  June 1979, cat. no. 17
New York, Fishbach Gallery, Figurative/Realist (a benefit exhibition for ARTIST'S CHOICE MUSEUM), September 1979, n.p., illustrated

This painting 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 brushed metal strip frame with a float.
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Untitled XV from 1977 belongs to the momentous series of abstract landscape paintings and sculptures that date from perhaps Willem de Kooning's most exuberant and prolific period in his rich and complex career.  Coming on the heels of a long period of abstinence from painting, the present work, and other canvases from the mid-1970s explode with color and are executed in lush, sensuous paint strokes. De Kooning was always a superb colorist, whether using a palette of black and white in the abstractions of the early 1940s or the pastel hues and acidic, jarring tones of his Women paintings and Urban Landscapes of the 1950s. A change in environment introduced a new transformative light into his oeuvre that invited new vibrancy into his palette. De Kooning began spending summers in East Hampton in 1959, following the lead of Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky who had already escaped the urban commotion of Manhattan in favor of the countryside.  In 1964 the artist permanently relocated to East Hampton, reveling in the nostalgic remembrances of the Netherlandish landscape of his youth.  The ocean became a part of his daily regime and de Kooning was captivated by the spectacular light in Long Island and its effect on the reflections in the water.  A resurgence of confidence in his masterful manipulation of oil paint followed the artist's new creativity in the 1970s.   Untitled XV is a remarkable painting from this period in de Kooning's oeuvre that brilliantly demonstrates the artist's intimate relationship with his watery surroundings and the elements of light and air.  In shimmering light, forms dissolve and reform in a manner deeply akin to de Kooning's sense of abstraction.

De Kooning spent much of the early 1970s devoted to sculpture, producing clay and bronze figures in his first foray into three-dimensional art.  The tactile quality of sculpting was wholly sympathetic with his sensuous approach to oil paint.  Within both mediums, de Kooning pressed the antithetical dialogue between improvisation and control, resulting in a gestural tension that animated his surface to the extreme. De Kooning emphasized texture in the present work, allowing multiple planes of paint to coalesce in and out of each other across the canvas.  De Kooning, much like the Impressionists, absorbed his surrounding atmosphere, and sought to translate these intangible elements onto his canvases.  The artist's retreat to Long Island and his prolific body of work that followed can be closely compared to Claude Monet's body of work in his country estate and studio at Giverny.  De Kooning spoke of his sentiments towards the effect of atmosphere in a 1972 interview with Harold Rosenberg, "I even carried it to the extent that when I came here I made...a big pot of paint that was the color of sand.  As if I picked up sand and mixed it.  And the grey-green grass, the beach grass, and the ocean was all kind of steely grey most of the time.  When the light hits the ocean there is a kind of grey light on the water....Indescribable tones, almost.  I started working with them and insisted that they would give me the kind of light I wanted.  One was lighting up the grass.  That became that kind of green.  One was lighting up the water.  That became grey...I got into painting in the atmosphere I wanted to be in.  It was like the reflection of light.  I reflected upon the reflections on the water..." (Exh. Cat. Basel, Kunstmuseum, De Kooning: Paintings 1960 – 1980, 2005, p. 152)

By the time the present work was painted, figure had all but disappeared from de Kooning's work with the exception of the occasional flesh-toned zone of paint. Untitled XV's jubilant brushstrokes of salmon, yellow and bright green juxtaposed with quieter passages of white and dark greens, could be either landscape or seascape.  The grey-white could either be read as the frothy sea spray of crashing waves or beaches of sand dunes topped with green sea grasses.  In either reading, it is clear that the upper right quadrant of the painting holds the brilliant sun that illuminates the picture.

After the 1956 death of the other American titan, Jackson Pollock, de Kooning remained as the undisputed leader of Action Painting and carried the Abstract Expressionist banner well into the next generation. With vigorous gesture, thick juicy paint flowed from his brush, building up the heavy impasto surfaces so characteristic of his creative genius, further elaborated in Untitled XV as de Kooning scraped and flattened some of the surfaces with a palette knife.  In this way, de Kooning's oeuvre from this period can be compared to Gerhard Richter's abstract style begun in the late 1970s.  Both artists alternated freely between figurative and abstract styles, and while working in the abstract medium, both emphasized the process – the act - of painting with sweeping strokes and scraping of paint.  The paintings of 1975 – 1977 seem to be the most direct references to liquidity in de Kooning's oeuvre.  In Untitled XV, de Kooning employed the scraping and pulling of pigment in passages of green paint at the center of the composition, highlighted with threads of white, yellow and blue. Eloquently, he expressively captured the essence of not only the sea, sand, and surf of the Long Island landscape he loved but also elaborated his love of the medium of paint.  De Kooning's new found freedom of form, space and color in the paintings of 1977 was described by Bernhard Mendews Bürgi in the 2005 – 2006 exhibition of de Kooning's later decades at the Kunstmuseum in Basel, "Now, however, the accumulation of sensations between earth and light and water and sky, distilled and detached from anecdotal experience, exploded in a rush of painting.  What already applied to the abstract landscapes of the late 1950s and early 1960s became even more conspicuous in the series created between 1975 and 1980,...They are not abstractions of the experience of nature; they are abstract in following an uncurbed energy principle without beginning and end, allowing things to emerge, to rise to the surface in analogy to nature." (Exh. Cat., Basel, Kunstmuseum Basel, De Kooning Paintings, 1960 – 1980, 2005, pp. 24 – 26)