Painted in 1987, The Hat Upstairs singularly embodies the vibrancy, lyrical abstraction and deft painterly intention of de Kooning's final decade, which is now celebrated as the artist's "Late Period." The Hat Upstairs is an unparalleled masterwork from this period, a triumphant apotheosis of his abstract vernacular; de Kooning floats ribbons of hues that elegantly coalesce with chromatic vibrancy and a buoyant dynamism. The present work belongs to a mature corpus of lyrical abstract works de Kooning began in 1981, which occupied his practice for the remainder of his life. The Hat Upstairs is an exceptional example of this body of work, with the saturated pigment forming melodic lines and forms that counterbalance like music across the surface. The present work recalls the female form or rolling landscapes permeating the artist's entire oeuvre through the sumptuous curvatures which swell across the monumental canvas in unrestrained yet deliberate loops of unadulterated color. Although de Kooning's works from the 1980s are often referred to as one period, in fact, the decade is marked by considerable experimentation in each year. Exuding a breathtaking, poetic elegance, The Hat Upstairs is a masterpiece borne from the radical experimentation within de Kooning's legendary practice: here, he crystallizes his career-long investigations into line, color, and form to embody the visceral interplay between strength and sensuality, delicacy and mass.

Contemporary Art

Richard Shiff on de Kooning | Decades

In The Hat Upstairs, the tensions and harmonies between the thick, crisp white and dazzling hues recall a form captured springing through the air, reminiscent of the leaping cheerleaders and dancers in the photos that inspired de Kooning in the early 1960s. Articulated to a magnificent effect within the present painting, for de Kooning, white is not a void or background; here, it is as present as the colored forms, luxuriantly applied and brilliantly luminous. De Kooning skillfully juxtaposes white pigment with a lively surface of chromatic intensity. By conflating figure and ground, de Kooning's colors appear to be floating or dancing within the white background, thus capturing a t.mes less glimpse and ineffable vivacity.

In the 1980s, de Kooning's paintings heralded an enlightened period of rekindled spirit in the esteemed artist's creative output. Spending most of his t.mes in the tranquility of East Hampton, de Kooning painted with a grace and optimism in which he rejoiced in his mature period of artistic production, saying, “I am becoming freer. I feel that I have found myself more in the sense that I have all my strength at my command. I think you can do miracles with what you have, if you accept it… I am more certain the way I use the paint and the brush.” (the artist quoted in Din Peters, "Willem de Kooning: Paintings 1960-1982," Studio International 196 (August 1983), 4, 5.) Though abstracted, de Kooning's The Hat Upstairs reveals subtle clues from the light-filled East Hampton seashores and landscapes brilliantly distilled into color and line.

To achieve the calligraphic effect of his late paintings, de Kooning often painted across the canvas with a flat taper's knife in fluid, sweeping movement. The Hat Upstairs sees a winding expanse of ribbon-like forms and suave riptides of color collide against de Kooning's muscular and mature abstracted gestures, the immediacy of which is never lost, even among the billowing and contoured forms of the present work. Here, the fluidity of de Kooning's wrist, brush, or taper's knife confidently sweeps its way across the composition in broad bands of scarlet and meandering streams of cerulean blue. Thick arabesques of fiery warm tones crescent into each other, swirling into a layered amalgamation that seems to hold a gravity of its own while luminating with an aura of golden yellow against an expanse of white. Atop undulating passages of chroma, de Kooning also judiciously applies glossy white paint to create the impression that colors gracefully entwine in and out of one another, like turns of phrase in the artist's visual poetry. On de Kooning's technique in his late paintings, Carter Ratcliffe observed:

Within his 1980s works, The Hat Upstairs is distinguished as one of the relatively few paintings with a title. The title spritely brings forward the motif of a hat, a reoccurring motif also employed in his earlier Woman with a Hat, 1966 and La Guardia in a Paper Hat, 1972. In this period, de Kooning introduces a new approach that confidently harnesses the melodic buoyancy of the painterly medium. Recalling the compositional grace of Henri Matisse’s late cutouts, de Kooning distilled a lifet.mes 's creativity into a highly reduced language of color and line in his late period; here, the gestural painted forms and heavy impasto of his earlier output are distilled into graceful ribbons and harmonious arabesques of color. Exemplified in the present work, 1987 was an exceptionally productive and successful year, in which each work has a vivacity like none other. The Hat Upstairs reveals one of de Kooning's preoccupations during the 1980s, the almost Zen balance and tension between positive and negative, movement and color and the very air around the two that gives a shape its form and breath.

Artist

Willem de Kooning