Untitled

With its pale green background and colourful violet, red and yellow forms, Untitled is a vivid testimony of de Kooning’s interest in a non-figurative art during the 1930s. In 1935, shortly before executing the drawing, Willem de Kooning joined the Federal Art Project (FPA), sponsored by the federal agency Works Progress Administration (WPA). As part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the newly established program funded American visual arts in the aftermath of the Great Depression, which had resulted in the collapse of the US economy. Untitled marks this key period in American history, and also an important moment in de Kooning’s own artistic path. While being a part of the so-called $23.50 Club, the amount of weekly pay received by hired artists, de Kooning traced his way into abstraction while working closely with artists such as Arshile Gorky and Stuart Davis in the FAP mural division. Headed by Burgoyne Diller, an abstract artist himself, the division enabled de Kooning to work on his abstract biomorphic shapes, blurring lines between reality and pure composition. He also met Léger, whose ‘direct way of painting’ would have a lasting impact on the artist. Recalling his time in the FPA, de Kooning notes the major shift for him during these years: ‘I changed my attitude towards being an artist. Instead of doing odd jobs and painting on the side, I painted and did odd jobs on the side. My life was the same, but I had a different view’ (W. de Kooning quoted in de Kooning: a Retrospective, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2011, p.55). From this period of great development, the two mural projects on which the artist worked on were never executed; only his drawings, such as Untitled, remain.