Willem de Kooning’s Untitled (Woman) from 1969 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. The artist was primarily focused on sculpture for much of the 1960s and as such paintings from that decade, let alone works of the scale and complexity of the present work, are extremely rare. 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. Importantly, the present work is also one of the very last Woman paintings de Kooning made, underscoring its significance as both a final distillation of this pivotal subject, and a conflation of the two key artistic vernaculars of de Kooning’s career.

By the late 1960s De Kooning had been painting for fifty years, and operated by the mantra that “you have to change to stay the same.” (the artist quoted in: Karen Painter and Thomas Crow, Eds., Thoughts and Composers at Work, Los Angeles 2006, p. 39) 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 those later paintings, in which riots of brilliant hues and undulating collisions of line and form combine to form perfectly balanced compositions. However, whereas the paintings from the 1970s seek to reflect the light-filled and ataractic environment of Long Island – a glimmer of sunlight on the ocean, a rush of waves crashing onto the sand, salt infusing the air – and thus take as their starting point the landscape, Untitled (Woman) takes the female figure as its point of departure. De Kooning famously claimed that “flesh was the reason oil paint was invented,” and that belief is visible in every exuberant brushstroke of this remarkable painting. (the artist quoted in: “The Renaissance and Order,” talk delivered at Studio 35, 8th Street, New York, Autumn 1949) Sumptuous haunches and a shock of orange hair appear as the most legible demarcations of the figure who dominates the composition, a colorful and kaleidoscopic rendering of the female form. The work also retains some of the visceral sexual energy of de Kooning’s earliest compositions, perhaps most notably in the thickly applied deep red passages of the figure’s arm, or the gesturally demarcated breast. De Kooning revels in this final salute to figurative painting, imbuing his most celebrated subject with all the ferocity and desire that characterize his Women from the previous decade, while moving towards the lyricism and tactility of his abstracts from the 1970s.

Despite resisting clear figuration, Untitled (Woman) is captivating and evocative, inciting the deeply felt reverberation of witnessing another body emerging in space. Ralph Ubl, describings the sensual abstract paintings of this era in terms easily applicable to the present work, writes: “a flesh tone moves imperceptibly toward a skin tone, or changes to a garish red, a luminescent white, or a dirty violet; it can encrust, run away, or be smoothed out, going through one metamorphosis after another, repeatedly recreating and dispersing, erasing and compacting the flesh of the painting without any body emerging with which we might want to empathize. Whereas when viewing the picture close up we may be able to internally reconstruct one gesture or another, and thus feel a kinesthetic empathy, when seen from a medium distance the painting emerges as a segmented…body that intrigues us more than it attracts us, fascinating or disgusting us rather than inciting our empathy.” (Ralph Ubl, De Kooning Paintings: 1960-1980, Basel 2005, pp. 95-96)

Untitled (Woman) teems with vitality and encapsulates the singular way in which de Kooning breathes life into the flattened and abstracted figure. It is a prime example of what art historian Stephen Polcari calls “flesh without figuration” a theme that de Kooning would return to throughout the 1970’s (Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience, Cambridge 1991, p. 296). However, in Untitled (Woman) de Kooning has not yet wholly abandoned the figuration of the 1950s and incorporates legible figurative elements imbued with a shimmering abstract verve. Dancing between these two poles of expression Untitled (Woman) 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.

Artist

Willem de Kooning