Provenance
Xavier Fourcade, Inc., New York
Private Collection
Sotheby's, New York, May 9, 1990, lot 219
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Catalogue Essay
“I made those paintings one after the other, no trouble at all. I couldn’t miss…It’s like a man at a gambling table [who] feels that he can’t lose. But when he walks away with all the dough, he knows he can’t do that again. Because then it gets self-conscious. I wasn’t self-conscious. I just did it.”
- Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning’s, Untitled 13, 1977, draws the viewer into a lyrical abstract landscape that is drenched in a sensuous spectrum of yellow, coral, red, white and blue hues. Demonstrating de Kooning’s rich spectrum of painterly means, free-flowing brushstrokes race across the pictorial ground – splashing, spattering, and dripping in all directions to coalesce into a painterly ode to nature. In its baroque opulence, Untitled 13 is a quintessential example of de Kooning’s celebrated “pastoral” all-over abstractions from the 1975-1980 period. Executed in 1977, Untitled 13 was created in what David Sylvester lauded as the “annus mirabilis of de Kooning’s career”, a seminal year in which de Kooning created some of his greatest masterpieces that now reside in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and The Menil Collection, Houston, among others (David Sylvester, “Art: When Body, Mind and Paint Dissolve”, The Independent, February 15, 1995, online).

Untitled 13 triumphantly marks de Kooning’s return to abstract landscapes, a subject he had not interrogated since the late 1950s and early 1960s. Invigorated by the landscape of Springs, Long Island, where he lived and work, in 1965 de Kooning abandoned his over one decade long preoccupation with the human figure to distill the unique convergence of earth, sea, and sky of his environs. As de Kooning recalled of the genesis of works from this period, “They just poured out of me like water” (Willem de Kooning, quoted in de kooning. paintings 1960-1980, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, 2005, p. 189).

What was set into motion in 1975 with works such as ...Whose Name Was Writ in Water, 1975, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, erupted into a crest of creative ardor in 1977 – widely considered one of de Kooning’s most productive years. As David Sylvester explained, the year 1977, “came, with the artist in his mid-seventies, as the climax of a period in which the paintings…attain at their best a total painterliness in which marks and image coalesce completely and every inch of the canvas quivers with teeming energy. They belong with the paintings made at the same age by artists such as Monet and Renoir and Bonnard and, of course, Titian” (David Sylvester, “Art: When Body, Mind and Paint Dissolve”, The Independent, February 15, 1995, online).

With Untitled 13, as with all works from this remarkable year, de Kooning pushes the genre of landscape painting to new sensory pastures. Shifting away from the tightly organized compositions and heavily worked, dense canvases of the 1960s, de Kooning at this time begins to handle paint more freely and loosely, playing with the very tactile range of the medium using a brush, knife or even his fingers.

Continuously rotating the paper by 90 degrees, de Kooning builds up a dynamic space in which form, line and luminous color merge to convey the atmospheric light and textural variety of his environs. Freed from the fixed vertical-horizontal axis traditionally inherent to landscape painting, Untitled 13 evidences how de Kooning approaches the act of painting as an analogy to nature, “following an uncurbed energy principle without beginning and end, allowing things to emerge, to rise to the surface” (Bernhard Mendes Bürgi, de kooning. paintings 1960-1980, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, 2005, p. 24). Brimming with palpable energy and enthralling vigor, Untitled 13 perfectly illustrates how, as David Sylvester postulated, “De Kooning's paintings of the Seventies are an annihilation of distance…. These paintings are crystallisations of the experience and amazement of having body and mind dissolve into an other who is all delight (David Sylvester, “Art: When Body, Mind and Paint Dissolve”, The Independent, February 15, 1995, online).

6

Willem de Kooning

Untitled 13

signed "de Kooning" on the reverse
oil on paper, laid on canvas
30 1/4 x 41 1/2 in. (76.8 x 105.4 cm.)
Painted in 1977.

Estimate
$1,500,000 - 2,000,000

Sold for $4,155,000

Contact Specialist
Amanda Lo Iacono
Head of Evening Sale
New York
+1 212 940 1278
aloiacono@phillips.com

20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

New York Auction 17 May 2018

1
Jenny Holzer
Truisms: UNEX sign
Estimate $150,000 - 200,000
Sold for $471,000
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2
Cory Arcangel
Photoshop CS: 84 by 66 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient, "Blue, Red, Yellow" (turn reverse off), mousedown x=4000 y=5350, mouse up x=20000 y=1200
Estimate $150,000 - 200,000
Sold for $399,000
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3
Pat Steir
Elective Affinity Waterfall
Estimate $600,000 - 800,000
Sold for $2,295,000
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4
George Condo
Red Head
Estimate $900,000 - 1,200,000
Sold for $1,815,000
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5
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Flexible
Estimate On Request
Sold for $45,315,000
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6
Willem de Kooning
Untitled 13
Estimate $1,500,000 - 2,000,000
Sold for $4,155,000
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7
Joan Mitchell
Hours
Estimate $1,500,000 - 2,000,000
Sold for $2,775,000
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8
Robert Motherwell
At Five in the Afternoon
Estimate $12,000,000 - 18,000,000
Sold for $12,690,000
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9
Lucio Fontana
Concetto spaziale, Attese
Estimate $2,500,000 - 3,500,000
Sold for $3,015,000
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10No Reserve
Anselm Kiefer
Laßt 1000 Blumen blühen (Let 1000 Flowers bloom)
Estimate $1,200,000 - 1,800,000 •
Sold for $1,215,000
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11
Mark Bradford
Black Venus
Estimate $5,000,000 - 7,000,000
Sold for $6,052,500
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12
Gerhard Richter
Italienische Landschaft (Italian Landscape)
Estimate $1,500,000 - 2,000,000
Sold for $4,095,000
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13
Gerhard Richter
Abstraktes Bild (811-2)
Estimate $12,000,000 - 18,000,000
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14
Andy Warhol
Last Supper
Estimate $8,000,000 - 12,000,000
Sold for $8,232,500
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15
Ron Mueck
Man in Blankets
Estimate $500,000 - 700,000
Sold for $447,000
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16
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Untitled (Magic Worms)
Estimate $1,000,000 - 1,500,000
Sold for $1,139,750
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17
Cy Twombly
Untitled (Ramifications)
Estimate $800,000 - 1,200,000
Sold for $1,455,000
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18
Sigmar Polke
Stadtbild II (City Painting II)
Estimate $12,000,000 - 18,000,000
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19
Arshile Gorky
Untitled (Study for Mural)
Estimate $300,000 - 400,000
Sold for $275,000
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20
René Magritte
La grande table
Estimate $2,000,000 - 3,000,000
Sold for $2,295,000
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21
Henry Moore
Working Model for Draped Reclining Mother and Baby
Estimate $3,500,000 - 4,500,000
Sold for $4,215,000
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22
This lot is no longer available.
23
Rudolf Stingel
Untitled
Estimate $5,000,000 - 7,000,000
Sold for $5,940,000
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24
Georg Baselitz
Schwarze Säule (Black Column)
Estimate $1,200,000 - 1,800,000
Sold for $1,327,500
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25
This lot is no longer available.
26No Reserve
Mark Grotjahn
Untitled (Free Standing Large Garden Sculpture Mask M24.g)
Estimate $500,000 - 800,000 •
Sold for $519,000
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27
Wayne Thiebaud
Valley Ranch
Estimate $800,000 - 1,200,000
Sold for $1,815,000
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28
Kerry James Marshall
Untitled (Blanket Couple)
Estimate $3,500,000 - 5,500,000
Sold for $4,335,000
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29
This lot is no longer available.
30
Andy Warhol
16 Flowers
Estimate $5,000,000 - 7,000,000
Sold for $5,377,500
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31
Adrian Ghenie
Elvis
Estimate $250,000 - 350,000
Sold for $519,000
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32
Andy Warhol
Two Marilyns
Estimate $3,000,000 - 4,000,000
Sold for $3,200,000
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33
Donald Judd
Untitled
Estimate $1,200,000 - 1,800,000
Sold for $2,655,000
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34
Cady Noland
Tower of Terror
Estimate $2,000,000 - 3,000,000
Sold for $2,207,501
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35
Luc Tuymans
Model
Estimate $400,000 - 600,000
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36
Fernando Botero
Yellow Niña
Estimate $400,000 - 600,000
Sold for $555,000
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37
Anish Kapoor
Untitled
Estimate $550,000 - 750,000
Sold for $735,000
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38
Maurizio Cattelan
Museums League
Estimate $20,000 - 30,000
Sold for $27,500
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20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

New York Auction 17 May 2018

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Provenance

Catalogue Essay

6

Willem de Kooning

Untitled 13

20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

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