Willem de Kooning’s Standing Woman and Trees from 1965 is a brilliantly colorful and effervescent contribution to de Kooning’s oeuvre, critically bridging the gap between his iconic figurative paintings in the 1950s and the abstract work which consumed the last twenty years of his practice. Executed shortly after his relocation to East Hampton, this radiant work employs the vitality and gestural freedom of de Kooning’s abstract works from the 1970s but demonstratively draws upon elements of his famed 1950s figurative vernacular. Although de Kooning’s celebrated Women of the 1950s were by no means resolutely figurative, there are elements of the present work that appear to move further from figuration and closer to the celebrated gestural abstractions of the 1970s. In particular, de Kooning’s treatment of the paint, which veers from sinuous to strident, lyrical to brash, preempts the extraordinary balance of tranquility and chaos that defines his later paintings, in which riots of brilliant hues and undulating collisions of line and form combine to form perfectly balanced compositions. De Kooning was certainly influenced by his new environment; compared to the city life, East Hampton provided lush greenery, bright blue skies, and calming waters as inspiration. Importantly, Standing Woman and Trees is also one of the first Woman paintings de Kooning made, underscoring its significance as both an evolving distillation of this pivotal subject, and a conflation of the two key artistic explorations in de Kooning’s career.
