Willem de Kooning

Wayne Anderson, Boston

Christie's New York, 6 May 1987, lot 119

Private Collection, Geneva

Philip Samuels Fine Art, St. Louis

Christie's New York, 2 May 1989, lot 28

Private Collection, New York

Fayt Gallery, Belgium

Countess Viviane de Witt, Paris (acquired from the above in 1994)

Sotheby's Paris, 5 June 2013, lot 11 (consigned by the above)

Herbert Kasper, New York (acquired from the above)

Christie's New York, 12 November 2021, lot 235 (consigned by the above)

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Baden Baden, Staatliche Kunsthalle and Bremen, Kunsthalle, Twentieth-Century American Drawing: Three Avant-Garde Generations, January - August 1976, no. 105, p. 69

Pittsburgh, Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Willem de Kooning: Pittsburgh International Series, October 1979 - January 1980, no. 84, p. 114, illustrated

New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Berlin, Akademie der Künste and Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Willem de Kooning - Drawings, Paintings, Sculpture, December 1983 - September 1984, p. 58, no. 53, illustrated

New York, Pace Gallery, De Kooning / Dubuffet: The Women, November 1990 - January 1991, no. 15, illustrated

In June 1952, Willem de Kooning stood in his Greenwich Village studio as he completed Woman I, a masterwork among his early paintings that would open the doors to one of the most celebrated series of works in the artist’s decorated career. Amidst the New York School’s triumphant celebration of pure abstraction and gesture, de Kooning’s singular aesthetic vision in the 1950s kept the female form at the center of his pictorial universe, dancing upon the boundaries of figuration with abstraction. Executed in the very same year, Five Women presents a passionate maelstrom of graphite strokes that presage the graphic immediacy and emotional intensity that would continue to blossom in de Kooning’s works to come. An exquisite work on paper suffused with dynamism, Five Women has been exhibited in landmark exhibitions such as Twentieth-Century American Drawing: Three Avant-Garde Generations organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 1976 and the retrospective Willem de Kooning—Drawings, Paintings, Sculpture at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1983.

In Five Women, de Kooning’s handling of the figure reflects the lasting impact of the Abstract Expressionist artists, but particularly captures an early artistic dialogue with his fellow European émigré, Arshile Gorky. Like Gorky, the present composition reveals de Kooning’s unique ability to fuse figuration and abstraction into a fluid, evolving form, where sinuous contours and shifting anatomies emerge through an assertive process of drawing and redrawing. De Kooning himself did not shy away from acknowledging Gorky’s influence on his early practice: “When, about fifteen years ago, I walked into Arshile’s studio for the first time, the atmosphere was so beautiful that I got a little dizzy and when I came to, I was bright enough to take the hint immediately. If the bookkeepers think it necessary continuously to make sure of where things and people come from, well then, I come from 36 Union Square... I am glad that it is about impossible to get away from his powerful influence.” (the artist quoted in: “Editor’s Letters,” ARTnews 47, no. 9, January 1949, p. 6) Much like how the biomorphic compositions of line and color were a lens through which Gorky explored his own personal history and his aesthetic vision for abstraction, in Five Women, de Kooning’s strokes press, erase, and reconfigure the figure, imbuing it with a restless energy and sense of perpetual transformation.

The angularity and gesture of De Kooning's Five Women also perhaps echo another modern virtuoso in Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Picasso’s retrospective exhibition organized by Alfred Barr in 1949 left an indelible impression on the minds of New York’s younger artists of the mid-century; it is not difficult to imagine de Kooning roaming throughout the galleries of The Museum of Modern Art, inspired by the spatial distortion and vibrant brushwork found in the five seductresses of Picasso’s masterpiece. In Five Women, de Kooning responds to Picasso decisively, lending a fierce new momentum to the interlocking planes of Cubism and electrifying them with the nervous, automatic energy of the gestural line. “Of all movements I like Cubism most,” said de Kooning, “It had that wonderful unsure atmosphere of reflection—a poetic frame where something could be possible, where an artist could practice his intuition.” (the artist quoted in: “What Abstract Art Means to Me: Statements By Six American Artists,” The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, 18, No. 3, Spring 1951, p. 7)

Beginning in 1950 and periodically explored throughout his career, de Kooning’s celebrated Women constantly oscillated between figuration and abstraction, foregrounding his dramatic and dynamic strokes suffused with vigor and energy. In Five Women, each stroke of the artist's hand is at once a building block for the resulting figures but individual records of speed, agitation and tension; here, de Kooning continues his interrogation of the female figure as a site to explore physicality, gesture and rhythmic tension all with the immediacy that comes with graphite on paper.

Five Women reveals de Kooning’s process at its most immediate and unguarded, the hand fast and the line unmediated. The frenetic energy and fast pace of de Kooning's hand seems to radiate from the sheet itself. The composition pulsates with a rhythmic tension that recalls the dense physicality of his large scale paintings, while achieving an airy and graphic directness. This constant oscillation between gravity and levity, figuration and abstraction, motion and timelessness finds its roots in de Kooning’s superlative technique, elegantly described by curator and editor Thomas B. Hess: “He used an ordinary pencil, the point sharpened with a knife to expose the maximum of lead but still strong enough to withstand pressure. He made a few strokes, then almost instinctively, it seemed to me, turned the pencil around and began to go over the graphite marks with the eraser. Not to rub out the lines, but to move them, push them across the paper, turn them into planes… De Kooning’s line—the essence of drawing—is always under attack. … It is the characteristic open de Kooning situation… in which thesis and antithesis are both pushed to their fullest statement, and then allowed to exist together.” (Thomas Hess quoted in: Sheila Schwartz, ed., Modern Art: Selected Essays, Chicago 2023, p. 81) Captured here in Five Women is the genius of de Kooning’s singular brand of mark-making, articulated with remarkable complexity and dynamism, at once elegant and fervent.