Willem de Kooning

Exhibited by Pace Di Donna Schrader Galleries

Material Oil on paper laid down on canvas

Dimensions 76.8 × 89.2 cm

Price Price Upon Inquiry

Status Vetted

About the Work

Willem de Kooning’s Figures in a Landscape #2 (1976) offers a veritable lexicon of painterly gestures, articulated through a wide range of brushwork. These marks animate the slick surface of the paper—at times darting, at others looping and turning—forming calligraphic lines that shift in width, intensity, and even color. Some strokes assert themselves with crisp, frontal edges; others dissolve into sfumato-like blurs that hover ambiguously between forms and space. De Kooning emerges here as a painter of both addition and subtraction—concealing and revealing in equal measure, a kind of painterly archaeologist. Within this compressed field, one can discern fragments that allude to the body: disembodied hands, limbs, and other suggestive forms dispersed across a landscape-like ground.

In 1971, De Kooning left New York City for East Hampton, where he remained for the rest of his life. The coastal environment—its proximity to the ocean recalling his native Netherlands—and especially its distinctive quality of light, proved deeply generative. He spoke often of this experience, noting “...the space, the light, the trees… [to] look around with new eyes,” and later telling Harold Rosenberg in 1972, “I wanted to get back to a feeling of light in painting… to get a feeling of that light….” [1]

Here, De Kooning addresses painterly light through a layered process: a peachy, flesh-toned ground gives way to successive applications of opaque whites and acidic yellow-green hues. These passages activate the longstanding dialogue within Abstract Expressionism around figure–ground relationships. Forms assert and relinquish presence in turn—advancing, receding, or hovering in a dynamic equilibrium that resists resolution.

[1] W. de Kooning quoted in D. Sylvester, Willem de Kooning: Paintings, Washington, D.C., 1994, p. 197

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Provenance

Xavier Fourcade, Inc., New York
Acquavella Galleries, New York
Cohen Gallery, New York
Allan Stone, New York (acquired from the above in 1995; sale: Sotheby's New York, May 9, 2011, lot 23)
Private Collection (acquired at the above sale; sale: Christie's New York, November 10, 2015, lot 34B)
Private Collection

Literature

J. Wolfe, "Van Wim Tot Bill de Kooning," Jong Holland, vol. 1, 1994, illustrated p. 26
J. Wolfe, The Young Willem de Kooning: Early Life, Training and Work, 1904–1926, Ann Arbor, 1996, fig. 331, pp. xxxix and 590