Willem de Kooning

Estate of the artist
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Untitled XLVIIII is a joyously executed and wonderfully lyrical work, embodying the ultimate emancipation and refinement of Willem de Kooning’s audacious painterly vision. The present work remains a powerful testament to the creative powers of the mature artist. Much like the late work of Pablo Picasso or Henri Matisse, de Kooning’s late paintings contain the sustained energy and technical finesse of earlier achievements, and recapitulate, in a grand manner, de Kooning’s Cubisto-organic black and white abstractions of the 1940s. However, filtered through the experiences and paintings of the intervening decades, most notably the sun and light-filled East Hampton landscapes, the content of these paintings has been radically simplified, their composition distilled into pure color and line.

The gradual reduction of his energetic painterly expression has allowed de Kooning to re-channel and concentrate his considerable creative intensity into a subtler, more evocative construction of poetic form. Through the grand physicality of his brushstrokes and the bold intensity of his colors, the artist has reached a synthesis of sign and background that becomes almost tangible. As Gary Garrels notes, "The last decade of de Kooning’s painting clarifies something of the vital character of his art: his insistence on invention, freedom, risk. These are the same qualities that had brought renown to him as an Abstract Expressionist. In the 1980s de Kooning renewed their meaning as he renewed his vision of his own art. The old existentialist issues that have surrounded de Kooning’s work now appear all the more relevant, transformed as the paintings of the 1980s are from the paintings of the 1940s and 1950s." (Gary Garrels in Exh. Ca., San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art, Willem de Kooning: The Late Paintings, 1980s, 1995, p. 34)

Onto the massive clean white ground of Untitled XLVIIII, as tall and wide as de Kooning with an outstretched arm, the artist has floated a series of delicate lines and planes that show the influence of Matisse’s abstract cutouts, with their use of pure colors and contour lines. The buoyant drawing and the abstract calligraphy are utterly sensual, although freed from any specific references to the human or landscape subjects that dominated de Kooning’s work of the prior five decades. 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). The present work envelops the viewer with its tactile and gestural vibrant lines, creating an image of visual plenitude, showing an artist that has reached a serene relationship between his body, the paint and the canvas.