“I feel that I have found myself more, 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 of the way I use paint and the brush.”
Impressive in scale yet imbued with and exquisite compositional grace, Untitled from 1985 hails from the celebrated final decade of Willem de Kooning’s extraordinary sixty year artistic career. Onto the pristine white background of Untitled,-- a canvas as tall and wide as the span of de Kooning's outstretched arms--the artist floats and loops a series of delicate ribbons and planes of color that, in their ethereal beauty, evoke the striking elegance of Matisse's late abstract cutouts. The buoyant strokes of de Kooning's abstract calligraphy are utterly sensual, seemingly free from the clear reference to human or landscape that dominated de Kooning's work of the preceding decades. To compliment the fluidity of these cascading lines, de Kooning opts for a reduced and lyrical palette; nowhere is his ability as a colorist more poetically asserted than in these late masterpieces. Exuding ease, poetry, technical finesse and groundbreaking innovation, Untitled epitomizes de Kooning's life-long investigation into line, color and form, culminating in the radical transformation of his remarkable practice.
The paintings of the early 1980s announced a period of renewed activity in de Kooning's creative output, heralding a new era of artistic production. Having moved full t.mes to East Hampton by 1980, de Kooning began to paint with a new intensity which he viewed from the perspective of a long career as a premier artist. “I feel that I have found myself more, 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 of the way I use paint and the brush” (the artist cited in Exh. Cat., Washington, D. C., National Gallery of Art, Willem de Kooning: Paintings, 1994, p. 199). This new balance and clear-eyed confidence gave birth to an explosive creative energy and vigor which culminated in a series of extraordinary compositions. As seen in Untitled, de Kooning’s work is both kinetic and luminous, with dancing rhythms and diaphanous lines that are the ultimate realization and emancipation of his artistic vision. Unrestrained yet deliberate, his late paintings dazzle with musical vitality, their bold primary hues striking against the startling white ground that characterizes the series. Describings de Kooning's technique in his late paintings, Carter Ratcliff observed: "Something extraordinary happens in the 1980s. Dragging a wide metal edge through heavy masses of paint, de Kooning turns scraping into a kind of drawing. A process of subtraction makes an addition, a stately flurry of draftsmanly gestures. De Kooning has always layered and elided his forms. Now he reminds us that he does the same with his methods" (Carter Ratcliff, "Willem de Kooning and the Question of Style", in Willem de Kooning: The North Atlantic Light, 1960-1983, Amsterdam, 1983, p. 22). These paintings boast an enlivened spirit and a new freedom in which the artist’s innate gifts for line, color, and form remain paramount.
Notably, the “ribbon work” paintings executed from 1983 onwards exemplify de Kooning's ultimate shift towards the use of thin evanescent layers of primary color. The diaphanous fluidity and rhythmic suppleness of de Kooning's wrist here carves its way across the composition in meandering ribbons of vibrant red and broad flowing swathes of rich yellow. De Kooning channeled his wealth of creative experience into emotive construction by filtering the countless stylistic changes and compositions of the preceding decades into a radically distilled fusion of line and color. Enveloping the viewer with its vast, exhilarating visual plenitude, the present work reveals an artist that has reached complete union between his body, the paint, and the canvas. Executed on a grand scale, and with the finesse of an artist at the height of his aesthetic powers, Untitled emphatically extolls the supremacy of de Kooning’s inimitable abstract vernacular; as the critic Robert Storr noted of de Kooning’s paintings at this t.mes , “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” (Robert Storr, “At Last Light,” in Exh. Cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Willem de Kooning: The Late Paintings, the 1980s, 1996, p. 39).
Select Late Paintings by Willem de Kooning in Museum collects ions
“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.”
Much like the late work of Pablo Picasso, de Kooning’s paintings of the 1980s contain the sustained energy and technical finesse of earlier achievements, returning to the grandly lyrical manner of his Cubist abstractions of the 1940s. However, filtered through the experiences and paintings of the intervening decades, most notably the sun and light-filled East Hampton landscapes, the content of the 1980s paintings reach a peaceful serenity, leaving behind the baroque flourishes of paint-filled gestures in the 1970s. Untitled is the embodiment of the tranquility and confidence de Kooning gained through the experience of his unparalleled career which was punctuated by bursts of creativity that produced cohesive and startling shifts in his aesthetic while remaining acutely his own.
An endless expanse of ribbon-like brushstrokes and suave riptides of color collide against de Kooning’s robust Abstract Expressionist gesture, the immediacy of which is never lost, even among the billowing and contoured forms of Untitled. Unlike many of the artist’s peers who turned to darker or moodier styles toward the end of their lives, at the age of seventy-five, de Kooning radically shifted his artistic focus to create clear, elegant compositions emanating unprecedented luminosity. Untitled’s uplifting composition reveals an artist who has finally reached an enlightened balance between his mind, body and materials. It clarifies something of the vital character of his art and has the same qualities that had initially brought him renown as an Abstract Expressionist – an insistence on invention, freedom, and risk.
