"As for Mr. de Kooning’s contribution, it is of spectacular quality almost from beginning to end… It would almost be worth crossing the country to see the collage of 1950, with its big thumbtacks so firmly signposting an acrobatic tumble of cut paper. If Henri Matisse were not going to be Mr. Cut Paper until the end of time, this collage would give Mr. de Kooning the title.”
An irrepressibly vibrant and exquisitely rare jewel, Collage from 1950 declares a moment of pivotal importance within Willem de Kooning’s legendary oeuvre. Bursting forth in a chromatic eruption of compositional dynamism across every inch of the intimately scaled surface, Collage is immediately recognizable as a quintessential example of the artist’s mature abstract mode. And yet, with its richly textured surface, built up in layers of paper, paint, charcoal, and even scattered silver thumbtacks, Collage is wholly unique for its manifest inclusion of the elements that define its eponymous mode of production. Throughout the 1940s and 50s, de Kooning would often use a collage method to plan his compositions of juxtaposed forms, tracing the shapes onto paper and arranging them in various ways across a painting’s surface; here, however, he did not remove these layered elements, preserving the traces of a method that defines his most significant canvases from this period. Asheville (1948, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.), Attic (1949, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), and Excavation (1950, The Art Institute of Chicago) all evince this mode, their surfaces characterized by jumps, breaks, and visual ruptures between passages that mimic collage.
- Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950-52. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
In the upper left of Collage, two eyes top a female form with a silver tack for a navel; the figure recalls de Kooning’s infamous Woman I, begun in the same year the present work was executed.
- Willem de Kooning, Pink Angels, 1945.
Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles The remarkably vibrant palette of the present work is a hallmark of de Kooning’s greatest output. In particular, the brilliant yellow and fleshy, sensual pinks of the present work recall his earlier Pink Angels, a pivotal work in the artist’s transition from figuration toward abstraction in the 1940s.
- Willem de Kooning, Asheville, 1948 (detail)
In the indescribably sophisticated Asheville, acquired by The Phillips Collection in 1952, a trompe-l’oeil silver tack is drawn in the upper left quadrant, just as several tacks are physically present in Collage.
- Willem de Kooning, Gansevoort Street, 1949
In the bottom right corner of the painting appears a small window-like square. It is a compositional feature that appears in several of de Kooning's works of this period, including Gansevoort Street (pictured) and Zot (1949, The Metropolitan Museum of Art). The motif has been interpreted as a metaphor for an alternate space beyond the picture plane, or as the artist’s “way in,” a visual anchor for the composition.
- Pablo Picasso, Guitar, 1913. The Museum of Modern Art, New York
De Kooning’s style of collage-painting evokes the experimental perspective of Cubism and the inventive collage methods of Modern masters Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, the original pioneers of the method.
- Willem de Kooning, Excavation, 1950
Beyond the inclusion of paper elements, Collage bears a highly painterly surface. The scrapes and smears of pigment bespeak de Kooning’s signature working and reworking of his canvases, seen in masterworks such as Excavation.
As famed critic and curator Thomas Hess explains, pointing to the present work, “In de Kooning’s works of 1945-1956, shapes do not meet or overlap or rest apart as planes; rather there is a leap from shape to shape; the ‘passages’ look technically ‘impossible.’ This is a concept which comes from collages, where the eye moves from one material to another in similar impossible bounds... An assembly of sliced pieces of paintings thumb-tacked together in 1950 is the prototype of the technique of collage-painting that has been very widely adapted, first in America, now internationally” (Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, Willem de Kooning, 1968, p. 47). Befitting its importance, the present work has been featured in several of the most important exhibitions of the artist’s work, including among others the landmark 1968-69 travelling survey; a major retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2011-12; and most recently the celebrated Royal Academy show Abstract Expressionism in 2016-17. Within Collage’s barrage of “impossible” visual cues and dynamic marks, we witness a fully realized interplay of linear elegance, painterly gesture and sumptuous color, a superbly resolved summation of de Kooning’s legendary praxis.
Center: The present work installed in the exhibition de Kooning: A Retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2011. Photo by Jonathan Muzikar. Art © 2022 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Right: The present work installed in the exhibition Abstract Expressionism, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2016. Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London; photographer: Marcus J Leith. Art © 2022 The Arshile Gorky Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © 2022 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Offering its viewer an archaeological survey of the creative strata that accumulated to form de Kooning’s extraordinary aesthetic, Collage acts as a kind of Rosetta Stone, deciphering the arc of his painterly practice at this critical juncture in his career. From within the pulsing net of sensuous lines and glowing jewel-toned hues, de Kooning’s trademark oscillation between abstraction and figuration emerges; in the upper left, two eyes top a female form with a silver tack for a navel, while in the lower right, de Kooning’s recurring motif of the window emerges from the fiery orange and stark white pigment.
These references and others, composed of both painted gestures and underlying collaged paper, visibly delineate the artistic process that defined de Kooning’s practice during this time. Using collage methods as a means of exploring visual juxtapositions, the artist would tear his own drawings and rearrange them in new configurations, temporarily tack paper overlays to the working surface, or place scraps of magazine photos on a painting in progress for visual reference and position. In most cases, the papers were ultimately removed, and the jumbled, masticated chaos of imagery was rendered entirely in vigorous swathes of paint. In the present work, however, the physical elements remain, resulting in a pictorially bewitching synthesis between the fragmented visual effects of collage and the fluid integration of painting. At once graphic and painterly, Collage is itself a masterwork of de Kooning’s signature invention.
The contextual chronology surrounding the present work’s creation spans momentous events in the New York art world and in de Kooning’s own life and work. The late 1940s was a culmination of creative ferment in post-war New York and de Kooning was at the heart of an artistic community that changed the course of Modern Art. Together with Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, de Kooning's paintings from this period catapulted the burgeoning school of Abstract Expressionism to the forefront. His collage-painting technique mirrors the irrepressible energy of New York as the new center of the art world, shifted from Paris: the frenzied interplay between voluminous matter and tempestuous brushstrokes fills his composition to the edges, expressing the teeming life, grit, and cacophony of the city.
Comparable Masterworks in Museum Collections
Indeed, it is through its remarkable symmetry with de Kooning’s greatest canvases of the time that Collage can be measured. In the indescribably sophisticated Asheville, acquired by The Phillips Collection in 1952, a silver tack is drawn in the upper left quadrant, just as several tacks are physically present in Collage; Asheville also features the classic trompe l’oeil gesture of a piece of paper curling off the surface of the painting near the center of the picture, seen literally in Collage. Executed the following year, Attic also bears traces of the collage-painting technique in the shadowy vestiges of transferred newsprint glimpsed across its surface, revealing moments when de Kooning laid newspaper over the wet paint on his canvas. Further, the monumental Excavation, with its staccato medley of overlapping planes, delineated shapes, and assorted colors, illusionistically renders the complex visual effects literally encountered in Collage. For instance, the edges created by the paper fragments in the present work form borders and outlines where space and gesture collide; a similar effect is created in Excavation, as the framework of thin black lines define and separate planes and contours of shapes, creating an impression of layering and depth. In both works, positive and negative space become unstable and interchangeable, producing the highly charged, dynamic compositions that crackle with visual energy.
The contextual chronology surrounding the present work’s creation spans momentous events in the New York art world and in de Kooning’s own life and work. The late 1940s was a culmination of creative ferment in post-war New York and de Kooning was at the heart of an artistic community that changed the course of Modern Art. Together with Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, de Kooning’s works from this period catapulted the burgeoning school of Abstract Expressionism to the forefront. His collage-painting technique mirrors the irrepressible energy of New York as the new center of the art world, shifted from Paris: the frenzied interplay between voluminous matter and tempestuous brushstrokes fills his composition to the edges, expressing the teeming life, grit, and cacophony of the city.
In Collage, although the templates are physically present, reinforced by the tacks legible on the surface, de Kooning’s characteristically vigorous gestures visually undermine this. Pigment splashes and overflows across the cutouts and the substrate beneath them, blurring the boundaries between positive and negative, background and foreground. Some shapes command the surface, while others collide with a crunch underneath. The resulting pictorial immediacy and spatial organization evokes the experimental perspective of Cubism or Surrealism, revealing de Kooning’s continued admiration for European modern masters like Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, translated into the new American vernacular. Collage thus stands as a spectacularly vital and vibrant painting that powerfully conveys the artist’s genius for innovation, firmly establishing him as a new master for the contemporary age.
