WILLEM DE KOONING | UNTITLED

Of all the abstract painters exhibited and collected by Allan Stone, none is more closely associated with his program and expertise than the Abstract Expressionist giant Willem de Kooning. Allan Stone mounted numerous comprehensive exhibitions of de Kooning's work, and many of the most revered de Kooning paintings and works on paper in prestigious collections passed through Allan Stone's hands.

Untitled (East Hampton), 1960, displays formal connections to both the "Montauk Highway" paintings of the mid- to late-1950s, as well as the "Rome Paintings" of 1959/1960. Though described in crayon rather than oil paint, the gestural landscape-like forms in this work clearly relate to the earlier epic canvases and smaller paintings on collaged paper that were influenced by the surrounding Long Island landscape. Additionally, Untitled (East Hampton) is composed of sweeping bands and overlapping shapes on torn and mounted paper quite similar to those that de Kooning employed earlier that year while working in Rome on his famed black and white series. One might presume he returned to Long Island from Rome inspired by the works he had just completed and the reunion with the landscape he found so compelling.

Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 1904. As a youth, he spent nights studying at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques. In 1926, de Kooning immigrated to the United States. While establishing himself among the group of ascendant Abstract Expressionists, de Kooning briefly taught at Black Mountain College and the Yale University School of Art. He painted voraciously from the 1940s through the late 1980s, when dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease halted his artistic production. Early shows at Charles Egan Gallery and Sidney Janis Gallery segued into large scale exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institute, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Posthumous exhibitions include a full-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2011, among smaller shows at Gagosian, Pace, and Allan Stone Gallery. During his lifetime, de Kooning received the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964), the Andrew W. Mellon Prize (1979), and the National Medal of Arts (1986). The Willem de Kooning Foundation was established in 2011 by Lisa de Kooning, the artist’s daughter. De Kooning passed away in 1997, at his home in East Hampton, New York. Posthumous exhibitions include a full-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2011, among smaller shows at Gagosian, Pace, and Allan Stone Gallery.