Willem de Kooning’s Untitled XIII from 1984 emphatically reveals the mature artist working at the height of his creative powers. Here, the buoyant graceful lines of de Kooning’s abstract calligraphy are utterly sensual, and with his reduced and lyrical palette, nowhere is his grand ability as a colorist more poetically asserted than in these late masterpieces. The cascading lines describe a spatial openness and delicate balance that is freer and utterly confident as de Kooning literally draws on canvas in his purest fashion. Describing de Kooning’s technique in his 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 Willem de Kooning: The North Atlantic Light, 1960-1983, Amsterdam 1983, p. 22) Acquired directly from d'Offay Gallery in London in 1987, the present work has remained in The Macklowe Collection for over three decades.

Uniting a gestural painterly lyricism with his most refined palette to date, Untitled XIII evokes an emotional poignancy that rivals the iconic landscapes of de Kooning's Impressionist forebears. The artist’s confidence in his craft is clear in the calligraphic strokes of crimson paint that wind across the canvas, laid down with the deft certainty that accompanies true mastery. Typifying the brilliance of de Kooning’s most iconic canvases, Untitled XIII intertwines muse and medium in a harmonic paean to Arcadia. Reflecting upon this sentiment, de Kooning remarked, "There is a time when you just take a walk... you walk in your own landscape... It has an innocence that is kind of a grand feeling... Somehow I have the feeling that old man Monet might have felt like that, just simple in front of things, or old man Cézanne too... I really understand them now." (the artist cited in Robert Storr, “A Painter’s Testament: De Kooning in the Eighties,” MoMA Magazine, Winter/Spring 1997, n.p.) Standing before Untitled XIII, the viewer is engulfed in colorful abstraction as, like blooms opening in the sun, the full breadth of de Kooning’s mastery freely unfurls across the canvas.

In an homage to his great forebear Henri Matisse, whose late work, specifically his remarkable corpus of cutouts, similarly stages a collapse of the distinction between color and line whilst maintaining the ever-present reference to the human form, de Kooning here achieves what can be considered the final goal of his life-long investigation into the very nature of abstract art. Indeed, the artist himself described a sensation of tranquility and confidence felt in the final years of his career: "I feel that I have found myself more, the sense that I have all my strength at my command... I am more certain the way I use paint and the brush." (The artist cited in Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Willem de Kooning: Paintings, 1994, p. 199) This new balance and clear-eyed confidence gave birth to an explosive creative energy and vigor which culminated in his 1980s masterworks. This creative conviction is powerfully witnessed in the assuredly distilled and indelibly resolved composition of Untitled XIII, which equally recalls Matisse's famed cutouts in its bold lines as that Modern master's earlier Fauvist compositions such as Le Bonheur de Vivre (1905-06) in the heady heat of its palette. As seen in the present canvas, de Kooning’s work is radically simplified and luminous, with dancing rhythms and diaphanous lines that are the ultimate realization and emancipation of de Kooning’s artistic vision. Unrestrained yet deliberate, they dazzle with musical vitality, in bold primary hues against the startling white that characterized the series.

As Gary Garrels described, “In the 1980s works, the essential procedures and techniques were not changed but simplified, and the vocabulary of forms was retained but clarified.” (Gary Garrels, “Three Toads in the Garden: Line and Form,” in Exh. Cat., San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (and travelling), Willem de Kooning: The Late Paintings, the 1980s, 1996, p. 26) In a conclusive reconciliation of the two predominant leitmotifs of de Kooning’s oeuvre, and exemplary of Garrels’ analysis of the artist’s late work, Untitled XIII through its organic forms presents a dual celebration of landscape and pure, unadulterated abstraction, resulting in a picture that is quite simply breathtaking.