“I feel that I have found myself more, the sense that I have all my strength at my command. I think you can do miracles with what you have if you accept it …I am more certain of the way I use paint and the brush.”
One of the approximately thirty known paintings completed in 1982, which today stand as the best Williem de Kooning’s 1980s compositions, Untitled XXV is particularly striking in its elegantly refined yet suggestively alluring arrangement of color and form. An apotheosis of the mature artist’s indefatigable wellspring of decisive and skillful abstractions, de Kooning’s paradoxically effortless and yet highly meditated brushwork reveals the translation of his furtive drawing practice to grander forms. Held in the estate of the artist until acquired directly by the present owner, Untitled XXV has been cherished in only one private collection for over two decades after being on extended loan to the Tate Gallery in London. With its distilled palette and painterly lyricism, Untitled XXV evokes the same powerful emotive response affected by the artist’s tableaus of the 70s.
"The limited palette in the early- to mid-1980s was so liberating. It was like Japanese haiku poetry. Red, yellow, blue, white, and black are the bare essentials for painting. They’re the bases you can potentially mix everything from. Then he limited the colors again to the elemental colors of fire/blood and water/sky. I really like the freshness of the 1982–83 works, where he uses white paint and a scraper like it’s erasing in drawing. Through the scraper he can bleed the pigmented ribbons, cut them off, bury them under white, or almost erase them to a whisper ... Are you looking at form or space? Everything’s flowing and on the move. You can never quite fix your coordinates. It’s like he’s painting the offcuts or the space around Matisse’s cutouts. After 1983 he doesn’t seem to paint through forms so much, but around them, and the lines are the natural arc of his arm across the surface."
Among the most storied and pivotal pioneers of Post-War abstract painting, Willem de Kooning’s extraordinary career is characterized by a lifelong pursuit of innovation and art historical achievements, from his Woman paintings of the 1950s to the calligraphic beauty of his 1980s paintings, such as the present work. In this vein, the only comparable artist to achieve a similar consistent evolution of their practice is Gerhard Richter. The pervasive influence of Willem de Kooning’s legendary oeuvre on artists ranging from Gerhard Richter to younger painters such as Jenny Saville is a further testament to his enduring impact as one of the most influential artists of the twenty-first century.
Lilting and lifting ripples of color and calligraphic streams of black somersault across an expansive, diffuse white ground. Shocks of red, cerulean, chartreuse and yellow are softened, blended and blanketed by de Kooning’s iridescent white beyond their boundaries. Some forms are outlined, others demarcated less overtly, collapsing the distinction between color, form and line. Elusive and lyrical in its lightness, the compositional perfection of Untitled XXV is owed to the inherent tension engendered by the relationship of de Kooning’s linear gestures and the positive and negative spaces they quietly generate.
“Volume switching to void, and vice versa, had long been a preoccupation of de Kooning’s…so much has been surrendered, but so much gained. Density has been replaced by clarity, tonality by chroma, resistance by mobility of line, a granulated surface by a pristine one. Most audacious of all, pictorial containment has given way to the giddy thrill of sheer open space.”
The artist’s celebration of line had been integral to his process throughout his career and in the course of creating his later paintings, de Kooning mapped his compositions on large sheets of vellum–a practice which is perhaps evident in the artist’s pursuit of the ultimate painted effect of translucency. Unlike the broad, full-bodied lines of the Interchange paintings, or the churning, viscous lines of notable 70s tableaus, de Kooning’s linear marks of the 1980s are freer and their relationship to each other is indebted to de Kooning’s sense of space as a draftsman. John Elderfield elegantly described the gestural exchange in de Kooning’s late works as: “Volume switching to void, and vice versa, had long been a preoccupation of de Kooning’s…so much has been surrendered, but so much gained. Density has been replaced by clarity, tonality by chroma, resistance by mobility of line, a granulated surface by a pristine one. Most audacious of all, pictorial containment has given way to the giddy thrill of sheer open space.” (John Elderfield quoted in: Exh. Cat., New York, Gagosian Gallery, Willem de Kooning: Ten Paintings, 1983—1985, 2013, p. 27)
Market Precedent: Willem de Kooning 1980s Paintings
De Kooning’s 80s canvases deconstruct the core elements present in his work throughout the course of his career, presenting line and color in their purest forms, while inventing fresh nuance in color through his prolific use of white. Nearly a century prior, Claude Monet’s late Nymphéas grew more abstract with the artist’s age–his perspective shifted relative to the picture plane, subverting the viewer’s relative concept of space and capturing the impossible visual effect of boundless reflections of sky and light mirrored two-dimensionally from the water’s surface. The paintings of the early 1980s marked just such a momentous change as de Kooning, spending most of his time in the calm of East Hampton, began to paint with a new grace and fertility which he viewed from the perspective of a long career as a premier artist. De Kooning returned to the serene beauty of East Hampton’s sunlit countryside and sea as an endless source from which to plumb inspiration. In the first few years of this pivotal decade, this new balance and clear-eyed confidence gave birth to an explosive creative energy and vigor which culminated in a series of monumental paintings.
Within Untitled XXV’s vast plane of white, whispers and layered glances of the more raucous colors of the artist’s palette are blurred and translucent suggesting a vitreous reflection, or the artist’s recapitulation of the same aims as Monet’s late Nymphéas. Rather than Monet, de Kooning referred to Matisse directly as an inspiration during this period. In Untitled XXV, the ribbon-like wisps of color in a broad, monochromatic field intimate the elemental gestures of Matisse’s paradigmatic ring of dancers in his Dance (I) of 1909. Untitled XXV is the embodiment of the experience and confidence de Kooning gained through the experience of an unparalleled career which produced cohesive and startling shifts in his aesthetic and the canon abstraction while remaining acutely his own.
“In the 1980s works, the essential procedures and techniques were not changed but simplified, and the vocabulary of forms was retained but clarified”
By way of de Kooning’s refined hand and practice, his unerring ability to reinvent his own modes of painting, and his mature spirit, Untitled XXV is reflective of a culmination of the artist’s brilliance. De Kooning’s late-era paintings, perhaps best represented by those executed in 1982 such as the present Untitled XXV, reflect the purest, most minimal qualities of the natural world–unadulterated light and color. Through its singular composition of gesture and color, Untitled XXV boasts every sign of his confidence in the pursuit of pure abstraction. Through revisioning his own masterful designs and the ideals of the masters who preceded him, the present work is a fully realized coda in the schema of the career of one of art history’s most daring innovators.
