Awash in pearlescent, evanescent color, Willem de Kooning’s Untitled is exemplary of the artist’s unparalleled master of gesture, with vibrant coral, golden yellow, deep red and tantalizing white and aquamarine pigments, scrawled across the expansive surface. Executed in 1965, Untitled is a brilliantly colorful and effervescent contribution to Willem 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 in 1967, shortly after his relocation to East Hampton, this radiant work evinces 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.
“Very soon after de Kooning’s move to Long Island, the female figure again became the focus of his work… though his painterly expression was now more closely related, in details, to the abstract landscapes than to the earlier, controversial Women, the bodies and faces of the women in these new images were just as violently distorted toward the demonic, even diabolic.”
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. Adopting the pastoral with a new highly-keyed palette, embracing hues that emit a dazzling light. De Kooning took to the paper with a newfound sense of vitality and fervor. Dancing between these two poles of expression, Untitled lyrically and energetically captures the complexity, breadth and luminosity of de Kooning’s work, and embodies the development of his style from the 1950s to the 1970s.
