Five Women

Details

WILLEM DE KOONING (1904-1997)
Five Women
signed 'de Kooning' (lower right)
graphite on paper
17 1⁄2 x 28 1⁄2 in. (44.5 x 72.4 cm.)
Executed in 1952.

Provenance

Wayne Anderson, Boston
Private collection, Geneva
Anon. sale; Christie's, New York, 6 May 1987, lot 119
Private collection
Philip Samuels Fine Art, St. Louis
Anon. sale; Christie's, New York, 2 May 1989, lot 28
Private collection, New York
Private collection, Belgium
Countess Viviane de Witt, Paris, 1994
Her sale; Sotheby's, Paris, 5 June 2013, lot 11
Acquired at the above sale by the late owner

Exhibited

New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Baden Baden, Staatliche Kunsthalle; Bremen, Kunsthalle, Twentieth-Century American Drawing: Three Avant-Garde Generations, January-August 1976, p. 69, no. 105.
Pittsburgh, Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Willem de Kooning: Pittsburgh International Series, October 1979-January 1980, no. 84 (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. 157, no. 53 (illustrated).

Conditions of sale

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Lot Essay

“She could be open-ended and mysterious, from ancient Mesopotamia and also modern Hollywood. She could owe something to Picasso’s women but also reflect the symbolist deities that filled the art of de Kooning’s youth, muses who often abandoned and possessed men. She could be mother and wife, monster and lover, a creature at once earthbound and hallucinatory, grotesque, cruel, monumental, cartoonish, and funny—a contemporary goddess who could possess the viewer, but could not, in turn, be possessed” (M. Stevens & A. Swan, de Kooning: An American Master, New York, 2004, p. 310).

Five Women

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Lot Essay

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