MY MAGICAL ATTIC: WILLEM DE KOONING: PAINTER & SCULPTOR

WILLEM DE KOONING: PAINTER & SCULPTOR

EXPERIMENTAL MOVEMENT DURING 20 TH CENTURY

ASHEVILLE 1948 ( DETAIL )

ASHEVILLE 1948

Oil and Enamel on Cardboard

Dimensions: 65.1 × 81 cm

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

ASHEVILLE 1948 ( DETAIL )

UNTITLED ( CLAMDIGGER SERIES ) 1965

Charcoal on Paper

Dimensions: 49.5 × 61 cm

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

COMPOSITION 1955

Oil, Enamel, and Charcoal on Canvas

Dimensions: 201 x 175.6 cm

CREDIT LINESolomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2015

Although often cited as the originator of Action Painting, an abstract, purely formal and intuitive means of expression, Willem de Kooning most often worked from observable reality, primarily from figures and the landscape. From 1950 to 1955, de Kooning completed his famous Women series, integrating the human form with the aggressive paint application, bold colors, and sweeping strokes of Abstract Expressionism. These female “portraits” provoked not only with their vulgar carnality and garish colors, but also because of their embrace of figural representation, a choice deemed regressive by many of de Kooning’s Abstract Expressionist contemporaries, but one to which he consistently returned for many decades.

Composition serves as a bridge between the Women and de Kooning’s next series of work, classified by critic Thomas Hess as the Abstract Urban Landscapes (1955–58). According to the artist, “the landscape is in the Woman and there is Woman in the landscapes.” Indeed, Composition reads as a Woman obfuscated by de Kooning’s agitated brushwork, clashing colors, and allover composition with no fixed viewpoint. Completed while the artist had a studio in downtown New York, Composition’s energized dashes of red, turquoise, and chrome yellow suggest the frenetic pace of city life, without representing any identifiable urban inhabitants or forms.

Painted 20 years later, after de Kooning moved to East Hampton, New York, seeking to work in greater peace and isolation, …Whose Name Was Writ in Water takes nature as its theme. Water was a favorite subject of the artist, and he devised a rapid, slippery technique of broad impasto strokes with frayed edges, speckled with drips, to convey its fluidity and breaking movement. The title, taken from an epigraph on Keats’s tomb, which de Kooning had seen on a trip to Rome in 1960, is, according to critic Harold Rosenberg, “the closest de Kooning can come to saluting overtly the impermanence of existence, and things in a state of disappearance.” Always aiming to reinforce the content of his work with his technique, de Kooning reworked his canvases over and over again, making each painting a composite of evanescent visual traces. The scrambled pictorial vocabulary and condensed space of the urban landscapes was gradually diffused in de Kooning’s later work. More open compositions, a less cluttered palette, and looser, liquid brushstrokes reveal a painter relieved of the nervous, claustrophobic atmosphere of city life and newly at peace with his rural surroundings.

Bridget Alsdorf

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artwork/992

NO FEAR BUT A LOT OF TREMBLING 1963

Charcoal on Paper

Dimensions: 8 3/8 x 10 7/8 inches

Private collection

Photo courtesy of Allan Stone Projects, New York

TWO WOMEN WITH STILL LIFE 1952

Pastel, Charcoal on Paper

Dimensions: 56.5 × 47.6 cm

MOCA, Los Angeles

TWO WOMEN WITH STILL LIFE 1952 ( DETAIL )

UNTITLED 1968

Charcoal on Transparentized Paper

Dimensions: 60.8 x 47.9 cm

Gift of the artist

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

TWO WOMEN WITH STILL LIFE 1952 ( DETAIL )

HOSTESS ( BAR GIRL ) 1973

Bronze

Dimensions: 123.8 × 96.5 × 65.4 cm

New York / Image provided by Nasher Sculpture Center

Nasher Sculpture Center

WOMAN 1951

Charcoal and Pastel on Paper

Dimensions: 21-1/2 x 16 inches.

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

WOMAN 1948

One Side of a Double - Sided Work

Oil and Enamel on Fiberboard

Dimensions: 53 5/8 x 44 5/8 inches

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution

Gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, 1966

Photograph by Lee Stalsworth

UNTITLED

Charcoal and Oil on Vellum

Christie's

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

WOMAN II - 1952

Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 149.9 x 109.3 cm

Credit: Gift of Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

SEATED WOMAN 1952

Pencil, Pastel, and Oil on Two Sheets of Paper

Dimensions: 30.8 x 24.2 cm

Credit: The Lauder Foundation Fund

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

WOMAN I, 1950 - 1952

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 192.7 x 147.3 cm

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

WOMAN ACCABONAC 1966

Oil on Paper Mounted on Canvas

Dimensions: 79 1/8 x 35 inches

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Purchase, with funds from the Artist and Mrs. Bernard F. Gimbel 67.75

WOMAN 1965

Medium

Charcoal on Transparentized Paper

Dimensions: 203.2 x 90.8 cm

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

A WOMAN ( MARILYN ) 1965

Oil on Paper Mounted on Masonite

Dimensions: 91.4 × 53.3 cm

EDWARD TYLER NAHEM FINE ART LLC

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

WOMAN WITH CORSET & LONG HAIR 1971

Lithograph

Dimensions: 37 x 30 inches
Private Collection

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

SEATED WOMAN 1950

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

SEATED WOMAN 1950 ( DETAIL )

LARGE TORSO SOTH

incised with the artist's signature and numbered 1/7
Bronze
Dimensions: 88.9 x 78.7 x 60.9 cm

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

SEATED WOMAN 1950 ( DETAIL )

NO TITLE 1988

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 77 x 88 inches
Private Collection
Photograph by Christopher Burke

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

THE PRIVILIGED ( UNTITLED XX ) 1985
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 70 x 80 inches (177.8 x 203.2 cm)
© 2013 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Photo by Tim Nighswander

QUATRE LITHOGRAPHIES 1986

Lithograph

Dimensions: 71.9 × 61.4 cm

Edition of 50 + proofs

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

UNTITLED XVIII, 1982

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 203.2 × 177.8 cm

Christie's

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

NO TITLE 1984
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 195.6 x 223.5 cm

Gagosian Gallery
© 2013 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

VALENTINE 1947

Oil and Enamel and Paper on Board

Dimensions: 92.2 × 61.5 cm

ARS, NY and DACS,

London 2015, photo SCALA, Florence

BEACH SCENE 1971

Lithograph

Dimensions: 80 × 58.4 cm

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

PINK ANGELS C. 1945

Oil and Charcoal on Canvas,

Dimensions: 52 x 40 inches

Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles

Photograph by Brian Forrest

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

UNTITLED ( TWO FORMS ) 1971

Lithograph on Thin Beige Paper

Dimensions: 35 1/4 x 44 inches

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

©The Willem de Kooning Foundation/

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

GRUMMAN 1964

Oil on Newspaper

Dimensions: 45 x 29 1/2 inches

Private Collection

©The Willem de Kooning Foundation/

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

REVENGE 1960

Etching in Black on Rives Paper

Dimensions: 16 7/8 x 19 3/4 inches

National Gallery of Art, Washington

Prospero Foundation Fund 1997.6.5

Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington

SPECIAL DELIVERY 1946

Oil, Enamel, and Charcoal on Paper Mounted on Paperboard

Dimensions: 23 3/8 x 30 inches

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution,

Washington, D.C. Gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, 1966

Photograph by Lee Stalsworth

BLACK FRIDAY 1948
Oil and Enamel on Pressed Wood Panel
Dimensions: 125 x 90 cm
Princeton University Art Museum. Gift of H. Gates Lloyd,

Class of 1923, and Mrs. Lloyd in honor of the Class of 1923

UNTITLED

Oil on Newsprint

Christie's

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

ATTIC 1949

Oil, Enamel, and Newspaper Transfer on Canvas

Dimensions: 61 7/8 x 81 inches
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection, Gift of Muriel Kallis Newman,

in honor of her son, Glenn David Steinberg, 1982 (1982.16.3)
Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

ABSTRACTION 1949 - 50

Mixed Media on Board

Dimensions: 14 9/16 x 18 5/16 inches
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Photograph © Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

EXCAVATION 1950

Oil and Enamel on Canvas

Dimensions: 81 x 100 1/4 inches

Frank G. Logan Purchase Prize Fund; restricted gifts of Edgar

J. Kaufmann, Jr., and Mr. and Mrs. Noah Goldowsky, Jr., 1952.1

The Art Institute of Chicago

PAINTING 1948

Enamel and Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 108.3 x 142.5 cm

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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De Kooning used oil and enamel sign paint to make this black and white abstraction, which he created in the same year as he held his first solo exhibition. He began Painting by transferring segments of figurative drawings to the canvas, then applying layers of paint. He maintained that "even abstract shapes must have a likeness." Indeed, these black forms bounded by white seem to approximate letters or human forms that never yield full legibility. Within the confines of a black and white palette, de Kooning delivers a complex and rich handling of paint: it drips, bleeds, congeals into solid forms, or dissolves into diaphanous streaks—all of which result in a densely packed painting composed with a great economy of means.

http://www.moma.org/collection/works/79242?locale=en

UNTITLED ( THREE FIGURES ) 1947 - 48

Oil, Enamel, Graphite, and Charcoal on Paper

Dimensions: 20 3/4 x 24 inches

Glenstone - Photograph by Tim Nighswander

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

UNTITLED ( MAN STANDING, FACING LEFT ) 1970

Lithograph ( Black Ink on Paper )

Hollis Taggart Galleries

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

JUDGMENT DAY 1946

Oil and Charcoal on Paper

Dimensions: 22 1/8 x 28 1/2 inches

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

From the Collection of Thomas B. Hess. Gift of the heirs of Thomas B. Hess, 1984

CLAM DIGGERS 1963

Oil on Paper on Composition Board

Dimensions: 20 1/4 x 14 1/2 inches

Private Collection, New York

Photograph by Tim Nighswander/IMAGING4ART

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

UNTITLED STUDY ( WOMEN ) C. 1948

Oil, Crayon and Graphite on Cream Paper

Dimensions: 21 x 32 1/8 inches
The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York
Gift of Mrs. Richard Deutsch (Katherine W. Sanford, class of 1940)

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

BLACK & WHITE ABSTRACTION 1950 - 1951

Sapolin Enamel on Paper, Mounted on Canvas

Dimensions: 21 1/4 x 30 1/4 inches
Collection Jasper Johns
Photograph by Michael Fredericks

TWO FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE 1967

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 70 x 80 inches

Collection Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Image courtesy of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

DARK POND 1948

Enamel on Composition Board

Dimensions: 46 3/4 x 55 3/4 inches

Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles

Photograph by Brian Forrest

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

WILLEM DE KOONING

Willem de Kooning was born on April 24, 1904, into a working class family in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Driven by an acutely perceptive mind, a strong work ethic, and persistent self doubt – coupled with the determination to achieve – the charismatic de Kooning became one of America’s and the twentieth century’s most influential artists.

Showing an interest in art from an early age, de Kooning was apprenticed to a leading design firm when he was twelve and, with its encouragement, enrolled in night school at the prestigious Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques (Academie van Beeldende Kunsten en Technische Wetenschappen te Rotterdam), which was renamed in his honor in 1998 as the Willem de Kooning Academie. With the help of his friend, Leo Cohan, in 1926 he stowed away on a ship to the United States, settling in New York City in 1927. At that point, it was not the life of an artist that he was in search of; rather, like many young Europeans, it was the movie version of the American dream (big money, girls, cowboys, etc.). Nevertheless, after briefly working as a house painter, he established himself as a commercial artist and became immersed in his own painting and the New York art world, befriending such artists as Stuart Davis and Arshile Gorky.

In 1936, during the Great Depression, de Kooning worked in the mural division of the Works Project Administration (WPA). The experience convinced him to take up painting full time. By the late forties and early fifties, de Kooning and his New York contemporaries, including Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, became notorious for rejecting the accepted stylistic norms such as Regionalism, Surrealism and Cubism by dissolving the relationship between foreground and background and using paint to create emotive, abstract gestures. This movement was variously labeled “Action Painting,” “Abstract Expressionism” or simply the “New York School.” Until this time, Paris had been considered the center of the avant-garde, and the groundbreaking nature of Picasso’s contributions was frustratingly difficult to surpass for this group of highly competitive New York artists. De Kooning said it plainly: “Picasso is the man to beat.”[i] De Kooning and this group finally stole the spotlight and were responsible for the historic shift of attention to New York in the years following World War II.

De Kooning became known as an “artist’s artist” among his peers in New York and then gained critical acclaim in 1948 with his first one-man exhibition held at Charles Egan Gallery, at the age of forty-four. The exhibition revealed densely worked oil and enamel paintings, including his now well-known black-and-white paintings. This exhibition was essential to de Kooning’s reputation. Shortly thereafter, in 1951, de Kooning made one of his first major sales when he received the Logan Medal and Purchase Prize from the Art Institute of Chicago for his grand-scale abstraction, Excavation (1950). This is arguably one of the most important paintings of the twentieth century. During this period, de Kooning gained the support of Clement Greenberg and later Harold Rosenberg, the two foremost and rivaling critics in New York.

De Kooning’s success did not dampen his need for exploration and experimentation. In 1953, he shocked the art world by exhibiting a series of aggressively painted figural works, commonly known as the “Women” paintings. These women were types or icons more than portraits of individuals. His return to figuration was perceived by some as a betrayal of Abstract Expressionist principles, which emphasized abstraction. He lost Greenberg’s support, yet Rosenberg remained convinced of his relevance. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, accepted de Kooning’s change in style as an advancement in his work and purchased Woman I (1950 – 1952) in 1953. What seemed to some as stylistically reactionary, to others was clearly avant-garde.

De Kooning’s dramatic rise to prominence between 1948 and 1953 was only the first act in a remarkable artistic career. While many of his contemporaries developed a mature “signature style,” de Kooning’s inquisitive spirit did not allow such constraint. Fighting adherence to any orthodoxy, he continued to explore new styles and methods, often challenging his own facility. “You have to change to stay the same,”[ii] is his frequently quoted adage.

De Kooning was equally comfortable working on paper and canvas. In fact, paper allowed for an immediacy that appealed to him. From September 1959 to January 1960, de Kooning stayed in Italy, during which time he produced a large number of experimental black-and-white works on paper known as the “Rome” drawings. After his return, he traveled to the West Coast. While in San Francisco, he worked with brush and ink, but, more interesting, he experimented with lithography. The two resulting prints ( known as Waves I and Waves II ) became prime examples of Abstract Expressionist printmaking.

By the late fifties, he had moved from women, to women in landscapes, tto what seemed to be a return to “pure” abstraction, with works respectively referred to as “Urban,” “Parkway” and “Pastoral” landscapes; yet he never completely left the world of actual objects for pure abstraction. In 1960, he said, “It’s really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint today, when you think about it, since we have this problem of doing or not doing it. But then all of a sudden it was even more absurd not to do it. So I fear that I’ll have to follow my desires.”[iii] The figure reasserted itself, now in its more carnal form.

In 1963, de Kooning moved from New York City to Springs, in East Hampton, Long Island. Manipulating space as a sculptor would, he designed and built a soaring, butterfly-roofed, light-filled studio and home in a quiet, wooded neighborhood where he worked through the sixties before moving in permanently in 1971. The light and landscape of East Hampton reminded him of his native Holland, and the change in environment was reflected in his work. Colors softened and figures became loosely painted and fleshy, more “go-go” girl and “come hither” than angry and tooth-filled. He continued to experiment with his medium, adding water and safflower oil to make it slippery and wet, formulating what would seem to many an extremely difficult mixture to handle.

On a brief trip to Italy in 1969, after encountering a sculptor friend, Herzl Emmanuel, de Kooning produced thirteen small figures in clay, which were editioned in bronze. In the early seventies he explored both sculpture and lithography, producing a sizable body of work while continuing to paint and draw. In this period, more graphic elements appear in his paintings, some with flat applications of paint as opposed to a more painterly approach. This may derive from his exposure to Japanese art and design while in Japan in early 1970. His lithographs seem to reflect the influence of Japanese ink drawing and calligraphy as many exhibit a newly gained sense of open space, which in turn is also reflected in some of the paintings. The 1970s decade was marked first by material experimentation and then by breakthrough. Because of or in spite of the explorations, the late 1970s were a prolific period in which he produced voluptuous, thickly painted works which are among his most sensually abstract.

Visual struggle and wrestling are markers of much of de Kooning’s career. He was fortunate in his final decade to dispel some of the angst. Coming out of a methodology of sanding, drawing, layering, scraping, rotating the canvas and repeatedly stepping back to consider each change, the pared-down and at times serene paintings of the eighties can be seen as de Kooning’s ultimate synthesis of figuration and abstraction, of painting and drawing, and of balance and imbalance. Year after year throughout the 1980s, de Kooning explored new forms of pictorial space as revealed by works with ethereal ribbon-like passages; or some with cantilevers whereby straight lines may float or abruptly stop and balance against broad open areas; or others of crammed, bold, lyrical spaces. Vividly colored, predominately linear elements were juxtaposed against subtly toned white areas. With his avowed inclination to embrace the “ordinary,” he was free to acknowledge the unintellectual, mundane or humorous characters or objects at times perceptible in his abstract paintings. This again exemplifies his insistence on freedom from doctrinaire ideas of what art should be. It is also reflected in the spontaneity and simplicity of the light-hearted titles he gave to a few works in the 1980s, for example: The Key and the Parade, The Cat’s Meow and A Deer and the Lampshade. De Kooning had reached a more thoroughly open, less anxiously complex place in his artistic career.

Succumbing to the affects of old age and dementia, de Kooning worked on his last painting in 1991 and passed away in 1997 at the age of 92, after an extraordinarily long, rich and successful career. De Kooning never stopped exploring and expanding the possibilities of his craft, leaving an indelible mark on American and international artistsj and viewers.

De Kooning was awarded many honors in his lifetime, including The Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. His works have been included in thousands of exhibitions and are in the permanent collections of many of the finest art institutions abroad, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Modern, London; and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; and in America such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Footnotes

[i] Harry Gaugh interview with Rudy Burckhardt, November 24, 1982. In Harry Gaugh, Willem de Kooning (New York: Abbeville Press, 1983): 112 note 17. This is a statement that de Kooning evidently repeated often in the late thirties and forties.

[ii] Willem de Kooning, quoted in Jack Cowart, “De Kooning Today,” Art International (Summer 1979): 16.

[iii] “Willem de Kooning,” in David Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists ( Yale University Press, 2001): 48. The interview was recorded in March 1960, for BBC. An assemblage of excerpts was first published in Location (Spring 1963) under the title “Content is a Glimpse.”

http://www.dekooning.org/the-artist/biography

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December 25, 2015

WILLEM DE KOONING: PAINTER & SCULPTOR