Willem de Kooning - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 15, 2007 | Phillips

Contemporary Art Part I

15 Nov 2007, 7pm
New York

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  • Provenance


    Xavier Fourcade, Inc., New York; Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York; Private collection, United States

  • Exhibited

    Paris, Galerie Daniel Templon, Willem de Kooning; Peintures et sculptures récentes, June 14 – July 21, 1984; Düsseldorf, Galerie Hans Strelow, Willem de Kooning: Bilder, Skulpturen, Zeichnungen, September 13 – October 20, 1984; New York, L & M Arts, Willem de Kooning: 1981-1986, September 11 – November 17, 2007

  • Literature


    L & M Arts, ed., Willem de Kooning: 1981-1986, New York, 2007, Plate 8, p. 33 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    "Most things in this world are absolutes in terms of taking someone’s word for it. If I made a sphere and asked you, ‘Is it a perfect sphere?’ you would answer, ‘How should I know?’ I could insist that it looks like a perfect sphere. But if you looked at it, after a while you would say, ‘I think it’s a bit flat over here.’ That’s what fascinates me—to make something I can never be sure of, and no one else can either. I will never know, and no one else will ever know. [You believe that’s the way art is?] That’s the way art is." (Willem de Kooning, in a 1972 interview with Harold Rosenberg, taken from B. Bürgi, K. Kertess, and R. Ubl, eds, de kooning. Paintings 1960-1980, Basel, 2005, p. 154). The last decade ofWillem de Kooning’s painterly career could have easily been a wash in the wake of his reputation from previous decades; the genesis of this last artistic impulse, in essence a living testament to the artist’s will to create, is at once a stunning model on the power of artistic expression and a story of intense personal struggle. Defying the many odds which were against him at the time, de Kooning nevertheless created, what many believe his finest examples yet or as Robert Storr argues, “of these works, a significant number count among the most remarkable paintings by anyone then active and among the most distinctive, graceful, and mysterious de Kooning himself ever made,” (R. Storr, “At Last Light”, taken from G. Garrels, ed., Willem de Kooning, the Late Paintings, the 1980s, San Francisco / Minneapolis, 1995, p. 39). The paintings he created in his ninth decade continued the link from previous years, but there exist a more fluid and open exhibition of color and form within them, the density of the overall chromatic intensity beginning to lighten: “His use of the scraper, which had been a common tool in his work since the 1940s, became pronounced again as he pared back the thickness of surfaces and created ribbon like effects, accelerating the feeling of movement across the canvas,” (ibid, p. 14). Untitled XVI, completed in 1982, originates from this final period of prominence within de Kooning’s master oeuvre, but it is also, significant to many, completed just after the artist fell into a groove with his new, late style, having worked out all the kinks the two years prior to the painting’s completion in 1980 and 1981, and perhaps more poignantly, completed just before the artist’s serious decline in health which ultimately signaled a final break in his artistic output. The years of 1982-1985 are considered by many to be his greatest in overall composition and quality. Many regard this last period of de Kooning’s art to signify a final return to his beginnings. The arabesque curves and careful demarcation of line, all visible in Untitled XVI, give way to larger blocks of primary-based colors, set amongst a field of white. The artist, in the 1960s and 1970s especially, typically exposed little to no white in his canvases, his name justifiably synonymous with washes of vivid hues that erupt on the surfaces of his works. “Nothing like this white had previously been the host of the painting’s plane. Its translucence radiates the light of dreams or reverie more than that of waking experience. De Kooning seems to have been reflecting on his past- the past replete with water and women so that he might turn it into his final beginning,” (K. Kertess, Willem de Kooning, NewYork, 2007, p. 14). By 1982, the year in which the present lot was completed, de Kooning was on a new mission in his personal life. Largely at the instigation and support of his former estranged wife Elaine de Kooning, the artist finally came to terms with the alcoholism that plagued the majority of his adult life. During this transitional period, the artist suffered through bouts of violent mood swings, depressions, and periods of lethargy which were a result of the chemical withdrawals. By 1980 the artist had completely stopped drinking, and by 1981 he began to enter a newly, energized stage of his personal life; revitalized and encouraged by his physical health, de Kooning began to paint again more steadily and with an intensified, focused rigor. His assistants were immediately ordered to stockpile the finest canvases and Winsor & Newton oil paints. What results, in paintings such as the present lot Untitled XVI, are the rejuvenation and steadfast inclination to align de Kooning’s previous techniques in abstraction techniques with a highly stylized and eloquent future. But a look to his earliest days as graphic artist and fledging Prince-like star of the Abstract Expressionists recalls in shape and form the very artistic tenets underlying a work such as Untitled XVI. Whereas de Kooning relied on draftsmanship steadily during his career, often creating sketches on vellum or tracing paper before putting his ideas to canvas, the late period in the 1980s began to see a decrease in the artist’s use of such drawings. The only other period in his career in which he refrained from their use was in the black and white paintings of the 1940s. In both examples, the delineation of form and abstraction of figure seem parallel, de Kooning exposes his methods as working out the compositional constructions simultaneous with painting them, ultimately creating the most vivid form of artistic expression in his entire life, or, as Robert Chapman explains by the 1980s: "He was just treating painting like a pad of paper. He was just working it out,” (G. Garrels, ed., Willem de Kooning, the Late Paintings, the 1980s, San Francisco / Minneapolis, 1995, p. 47). The comparison to de Kooning’s early work is further rationalized, “De Kooning’s work, at its core, is about neither style nor myth, but more profoundly incites an exploration of transformation and change. The last decade of de Kooning’s painting clarifies something of the vital character of his art: the insistence on invention, freedom, risk. These are the same qualities that had brought renown to him as an Abstract Expressionist. In the 1980s de Kooning renewed their meaning as he renewed his vision of his own art. The old existentialist issues that have surrounded de Kooning’s work now appear all the more relevant, transformed as the paintings of the 1980s are from the paintings of the 1940s and 1950s,” (G. Garrels, ed., Willem de Kooning, the Late Paintings, the 1980s, San Francisco / Minneapolis, 1995, p. 34). The principal studio assistant during this period of de Kooning’s great output, Tom Ferrara, is largely credited with helping foster much of the artist’s successes. The artist, in his eighth decade of painting, suffered from ailments commonplace with aging such as backaches and limited mobility. For de Kooning, who typically rotated his (large) canvases at least once a day during production, it proved demanding on him physically and the techniques which the artist relied on for over forty years appeared at risk of impeding his very output. Ferrara responded by innovating new methods to overcome the obstacles presented. The easel, for example, was turned mechanically and Ferrara devised a means of lining the backs with foam core which enabled de Kooning to apply as much pressure as he wished, which at times was quite a lot, to generate the expressive paint applications of scraped and squeegeed pigment, often times with such force as to tear the canvas itself. In the end, Ferrara helped enable de Kooning to continue producing canvases with the same tenacity and zeal as earlier in his lifetime, constantly engineering new techniques to conquer the same, inimitable style, liberating the artist so that he never missed a beat.

46

Willem de Kooning

Untitled XVI

1982
Oil and charcoal on canvas.
80 x 70 in. (203.2 x 177.8 cm).

Signed “de Kooning” on the stretcher bar.

Estimate
$5,000,000 - 7,000,000 

Sold for $5,865,000

Contemporary Art Part I

15 Nov 2007, 7pm
New York