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Lot Essay
Distinguished by the undulating ribbons of color that traverse the surface of the canvas, Willem de Kooning’s Untitled XXIX was painted during the last, great wave of creativity which capped an extraordinarily prolific career. Described by the influential critic Clement Greenberg as “among the four or five most important painters in the country” (C. Greenberg, quoted in J. O’Brian (ed.), Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, Arrogant Purpose: 1945-1949, Chicago and London, 1985, p. 228), de Kooning liberated painting from the confines of figuration and created works which captured the rawness of human emotion. Beginning in the early 1980s, he produced a series of works which, partly inspired by the light infused watery landscape of his Long Island, became some of the most lyrical and poetical of his career. Untitled XXIX belongs to that celebrated body of work.
In this work, de Kooning choreographs robust bands of red and blue pigment into a canvas that comes alive with color and form. In parts, they coalesce into the serpentine outlines that evoke the female form which so dominated his early work. In other places, they form strong, almost structural elements, which appear to support the composition as a whole. Whatever their intended purpose they are produced with the artist’s profound love of the painterly process and a confidence that is only achieved as the result of a lifetime of painting. Speaking in 1983, a few years before Untitled XXIX was painted, de Kooning reflected on the freedom that he felt during this important period of his career. “I am becoming freer,” he said, “I feel that I have found myself more, the sense that I have all my strength at my command. I think you can do miracles with what you have if you accept it. ...I am more certain in the way I use paint and the brush” (W. de Kooning, quoted in Willem de Kooning, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1995, p. 199).
Among the mysteries of de Kooning’s painterly mastery is such play between color and form—here in Untitled XXIX, the counterpoint between filaments, zones of color, and their surrounds. It is as if by reducing the palette—like Franz Kline’s masterful black and white paintings from the 1950s, or the jazz infected rhythms of Stuart Davis’ post-war paintings—de Kooning could focus more closely on the compositional issues, the way in which sinewy ribbons weave arabesques in and out to create adjacent events between contour and color field, the linear markings creating swelling volumes floating in open areas of color. How such decisions were made was both experiential and intuitive, for de Kooning was known to reorient his paintings as they evolved. Making his decision not at the final stroke of the brush, but rather when he settled upon just how the painting would be hung, a composition would evolve as sight lines shifted. There is also a sense in which the white of Untitled XXIX functions as a backdrop to emphasize linear and chromatic events: the flux de Kooning sets up between background and foreground, between image and surround is among the most exciting of his entire oeuvre.
De Kooning’s union of line and color recalls the flowing forms of Matisse’s modernist masterpiece, the Blue Nude of 1956. Just as the French artist creates spatial ambiguity by combining disparate parts of the body, de Kooning condenses limbs, silhouettes, landscapes into one forceful gesture. The contiguous lines of Matisse’s model seems almost to foreshadow de Kooning’s later work, in which these disparate forms are hooked into one another, the way they lie within or alongside other forms to create a series of interlocking gestures that combine to make the whole.
Throughout his long and distinguished career de Kooning consistently set the standards for new and innovative forms of painting. As he moved towards the end of his life he continued to produce paintings, such as Untitled XXIX, that were still as viscerally powerful as any that he had done before. In this aspect he joins a select group of artists—including Monet, Picasso and Cézanne—whose expressive gestural powers remained intact throughout their careers. Indeed, de Kooning himself noted this when he pondered “There is a time when you just take a walk…you walk in your own landscape… It has an innocence that is kind of a grand feeling that old man Monet might have felt like that…or old man Cézanne too…” (W. de Kooning cited in R. Storr, “A Painter’s Testament: De Kooning in the Eighties, www.moma.org). Indeed, he was not alone in this thought as the eminent critic Robert Rosenblum also concluded of the artist’s paintings from this period, “de Kooning’s recent canvases now enter the public domain of late-style miracles in the pantheon of Western painting” (R. Rosenblum, “On de Kooning’s Late Style,” Willem de Kooning: Late Paintings 1983-1986, exh. cat., Anthony d’Offay Gallery, 1986, London, n.p.).
In this work, de Kooning choreographs robust bands of red and blue pigment into a canvas that comes alive with color and form. In parts, they coalesce into the serpentine outlines that evoke the female form which so dominated his early work. In other places, they form strong, almost structural elements, which appear to support the composition as a whole. Whatever their intended purpose they are produced with the artist’s profound love of the painterly process and a confidence that is only achieved as the result of a lifetime of painting. Speaking in 1983, a few years before Untitled XXIX was painted, de Kooning reflected on the freedom that he felt during this important period of his career. “I am becoming freer,” he said, “I feel that I have found myself more, the sense that I have all my strength at my command. I think you can do miracles with what you have if you accept it. ...I am more certain in the way I use paint and the brush” (W. de Kooning, quoted in Willem de Kooning, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1995, p. 199).
Among the mysteries of de Kooning’s painterly mastery is such play between color and form—here in Untitled XXIX, the counterpoint between filaments, zones of color, and their surrounds. It is as if by reducing the palette—like Franz Kline’s masterful black and white paintings from the 1950s, or the jazz infected rhythms of Stuart Davis’ post-war paintings—de Kooning could focus more closely on the compositional issues, the way in which sinewy ribbons weave arabesques in and out to create adjacent events between contour and color field, the linear markings creating swelling volumes floating in open areas of color. How such decisions were made was both experiential and intuitive, for de Kooning was known to reorient his paintings as they evolved. Making his decision not at the final stroke of the brush, but rather when he settled upon just how the painting would be hung, a composition would evolve as sight lines shifted. There is also a sense in which the white of Untitled XXIX functions as a backdrop to emphasize linear and chromatic events: the flux de Kooning sets up between background and foreground, between image and surround is among the most exciting of his entire oeuvre.
De Kooning’s union of line and color recalls the flowing forms of Matisse’s modernist masterpiece, the Blue Nude of 1956. Just as the French artist creates spatial ambiguity by combining disparate parts of the body, de Kooning condenses limbs, silhouettes, landscapes into one forceful gesture. The contiguous lines of Matisse’s model seems almost to foreshadow de Kooning’s later work, in which these disparate forms are hooked into one another, the way they lie within or alongside other forms to create a series of interlocking gestures that combine to make the whole.
Throughout his long and distinguished career de Kooning consistently set the standards for new and innovative forms of painting. As he moved towards the end of his life he continued to produce paintings, such as Untitled XXIX, that were still as viscerally powerful as any that he had done before. In this aspect he joins a select group of artists—including Monet, Picasso and Cézanne—whose expressive gestural powers remained intact throughout their careers. Indeed, de Kooning himself noted this when he pondered “There is a time when you just take a walk…you walk in your own landscape… It has an innocence that is kind of a grand feeling that old man Monet might have felt like that…or old man Cézanne too…” (W. de Kooning cited in R. Storr, “A Painter’s Testament: De Kooning in the Eighties, www.moma.org). Indeed, he was not alone in this thought as the eminent critic Robert Rosenblum also concluded of the artist’s paintings from this period, “de Kooning’s recent canvases now enter the public domain of late-style miracles in the pantheon of Western painting” (R. Rosenblum, “On de Kooning’s Late Style,” Willem de Kooning: Late Paintings 1983-1986, exh. cat., Anthony d’Offay Gallery, 1986, London, n.p.).