"I’m back to a full palette with off-toned colors… Before, it was about knowing what I didn’t know. Now it’s about not knowing that I know."
Willem de Kooning’s Untitled emerges from a corpus of haunting abstractions, created with the finesse of an artist at the height of his confidence and painterly abilities. Following four decades of incessantly groundbreaking modernist innovation and enveloping the themes and aesthetic impulses of his entire oeuvre, this light, lyrical arabesque of colour and form held together by energetic line fully embodies the boldly reinvented style that dominated the last decade of de Kooning’s life, now celebrated as his “Late Period.” Executed in 1987, Untitled is paramount among the canvases of this decade for its chromatic vibrancy, compositional dynamism, and bewitching beauty. Distinguished by its striking palette of orange, gold, and violet, the present work crystallises the numerous investigations into painterly mark-making that defined the artist’s inimitable corpus within a single, exquisite canvas. Befitting its importance, this work was included in the major exhibition of the artist’s late paintings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1997.
Untitled is a truly superb exemplar of the unique painterly method de Kooning applied to his compositions of the 1980s. While at first glance the lyrical tangerine, mauve, and yellow zones appear to be floating upon a pristine white ground, their indomitable elegance and ethereal lightness was in fact achieved through de Kooning’s judicious application of cool white oil pigment atop a churning surface of chromatic intensity. As such, the graceful organisation of hued forms in Untitled was revealed by way of excavation as opposed to accumulation, the result being one of profound aesthetic and technical innovation from an artist in the final decades of his prodigious career. Here, the buoyant graceful lines of de Kooning’s abstract calligraphy are utterly sensual, and nowhere is his grand ability as a colourist more poetically asserted than in these late masterpieces, with their reduced and expressive palette.
His late paintings echo the formal invention of his lifelong influence Arshile Gorky, and the vibrant late cut-outs of Henri Matisse. Indeed, de Kooning seeks to “cut up” or pull familiar forms apart, sometimes dynamically setting them in motion and other times allowing them to float gently across a deep, projected space. Untitled showcases exceptional crispness, contrasting with the heavily painted earlier works that often combined a kaleidoscopic range of pigment as well as various mediums, such as oil paint and pastels, thickly layered with brushes and palette knives. Here, executed with exquisite looseness of brushwork, the cascading lines describe a spatial openness and delicate balance that produce a choreographed rhythm. Converging the simplicity and the dynamic equilibrium of late Piet Mondrian with the organic lyricism of Claude Monet, Untitled XVI represents an imaginary volumetric terrain that unfolds, warps, inflates and collapses with breathtaking, indomitable elegance and delicacy, channelling the old power of bulging, twisting planes and sculptural contour of Tintoretto and Peter Paul Rubens. Describing the artist’s late paintings, Carter Ratcliff observed, “Something extraordinary happens in the 1980s. Dragging a wide metal edge through heavy masses of paint, de Kooning turns scraping into a kind of drawing. A process of subtraction makes an addition, a stately flurry of draftsmanly gestures. De Kooning has always layered and elided his forms. Now he reminds us that he does the same with his methods” (Carter Ratcliff, “Willem de Kooning and the Question of Style,” in: Exh. Cat., Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Willem de Kooning: The North Atlantic Light, 1960-1983, 1983, p. 22).
Select Late Paintings by Willem de Kooning in Museum Collections
For much of his career, de Kooning had defined himself against the two modern masters Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso, both of whom had eschewed traditional methods of representation in favour of more iconoclastic artistic practices. Across the gestural canvases of de Kooning’s Woman paintings of the 1950s, traces of Cézanne’s innovative brushwork and Picasso’s radical renegotiation of space come to the fore. In the 1980s, however, de Kooning turned for inspiration to Henri Matisse, and indeed the present work evokes the lyrical and sinuous lines articulated in Matisse’s greatest canvases such as Le bonheur de vivre (1905-06); here, as in the present work, figuration collides with abstraction in vibrant and dynamic composition. And yet, despite looking to his predecessors, de Kooning forged his own artistic vernacular, one that remains among the most inventive, immediately recognisable, and transformative of the Twentieth Century. From his critical canvases of the 1950s, de Kooning preserved the scraping technique he had pioneered early in his career; yet the 1980s saw cutting-edge changes in his praxis.
Right: Pablo Picasso, La Lecture, 1932. Sold st Sotheby's London for $30.5 million in February 2011, Private Collection. Image: © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2024
To achieve the calligraphic effect of these paintings, de Kooning often painted across the canvas with a flat taper's knife in fluid, sweeping movements. Untitled sees a winding expanse of ribbon-like forms and suave riptides of colour that collide against the artist's muscular and mature abstracted gestures, the immediacy of which is never lost, even among the billowing and contoured forms of the present work. Here, the fluidity of de Kooning's wrist, brush, or taper's knife confidently sweeps its way across the composition in bands of indigo and meandering streams of amber. Thick arabesques of fiery warm tones collide into each other, swirling into a layered amalgamation that seems to hold a gravity of its own while luminating with an aura of golden yellow against an expanse of white. Atop undulating passages of chroma, de Kooning also judiciously applies glossy white paint to create the impression that hues gracefully entwine in and out of one another, like turns of phrase in the artist's visual poetry. On de Kooning's technique in his late paintings, Carter Ratcliffe observed: "A process of subtraction makes an addition, a stately flurry of draftsmanly gestures. De Kooning has always layered and elided his forms. Now, he reminds us that he does the same with his methods" (Carter Ratcliff, Ibid.).
Whilst still displaying the unmistakable traces of de Kooning’s remarkable touch and fluid wrist, Untitled boasts an enlivened spirit and a new freedom in which his innate gifts for line, colour, and form remain paramount. Exemplified by the present work, 1987 was an exceptionally productive and successful year, in which each work possesses a vivacity like none other. These are paintings that reinforce the most vital characteristics of the artist’s oeuvre: his continual insistence on invention, freedom, and risk. With an unmistakable sense of buoyant dynamism, Untitled reveals one of de Kooning's preoccupations during the 1980s, the pursuit of balance and tension between positive and negative, movement and space, and the very air around the two that gives a shape its form and breath.