Elaine de Kooning

Galerie J, Houston

Acquired from the above by the present owner in September 1963

Charging Bull is a vibrant example of Elaine de Kooning’s gift for capturing the essence of movement. Having produced a highly subject-centric oeuvre, de Kooning’s phases moved gracefully from action images of basketball players to traditional portraits. Her works depicting wildlife covered a wide range as well, stretching from her mid-century bulls to her later studies of the prehistoric animals painted in the Lascaux caves of southwestern France.

Charging Bull balances bright blues, yellows, and reds while retaining the characteristic softness of line present in her pastel works on paper. As the abstracted shape of a bull moves across the work, horizontal swaths of thickly applied pastel signal the figure’s movement across the space. These elements work in concert to present a classic piece by De Kooning, demonstrating her place within the Abstract Expressionist movement as well as within the larger narrative of twentieth century art. 

Each work a vessel for an electricity resonating from its subject, de Kooning communicated the fluidity of gesture and the impermanence of image through a confident use of quick lines and color. The central exploration of de Kooning’s work was that of gesture, “I want gesture, any kind of gesture,” she wrote, “gentle or brutal, joyous or tragic; the gestures of space soaring, sinking, streaming, whirling; the gestures of light flowing or spurting through color. I see everything as possessing or being possessed by gesture. If the gestures are inhabited by landscapes, arenas, bodies, faces, animals, or just colors, it makes no difference to me.” (Elaine de Kooning, "Statement", It Is: A Magazine for Abstract Art, no. 4, Autumn 1959, p.30). This common thread throughout her career created a truly unified body of work, bound by a distinctive, recognizable, and ultimately timeless style.