Untitled

De Kooning created a series of compact, rectangular compositions between the years 1956-1958. These small works were often made during the summers, when he would travel from New York City to The Springs, Long Island, and used smaller, temporary working quarters. The scale alone posed a new challenge for the artist, even though the practice of layering collage elements to create a composition was a favorite technique of his. Although de Kooning considered these compositions to be finished works within themselves, some of them he kept for himself and reviewed on occasion to influence later works. By 1955, following a series of fifteen large and small canvases, the image of Woman began to disappear from de Kooning's work. Abstract gestures and shapes take over, and the urban and suburban landscape period begins. Nonetheless, as de Kooning told Thomas B. Hess in 1953 "The landscape is in the Woman, and there is Woman in the landscapes" (Willem de Kooning, exh. cat., the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1968, p. 100).