WILLEM DE KOONING (1904-1997)










Provenance
Allan Stone Gallery, New YorkPrivate Collection, New York
Private Collection, Arizona
Exhibition
North Hampton, Smith College Museum of Art; Cambridge, The New Gallery, Charles Hayden Memorial Library, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Willem de Kooning: a Retrospective from Public and Private Collections, April – June 1965 (Cambridge only) New York, Allan Stone Gallery, De Kooning/Cornell, February – March 1965Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, American Paintings, September - October 1966, cat. no. 26
Dublin, The Ro...More...yal Dublin Society, Rosc'67:The Poetry of Vision, November – December 1967, p. 201, illustrated
Detroit, J.L. Hudson, Willem de Kooning: Three Decades of Painting, March – April 1968, no. 31 (exhibition checklist)
Easthampton, Gild Hall, Works from 1951 – 1981, May – July 1981, cat. no 21 (exhibition checklist)
Literature
Thomas B. Hess, "De Kooning's New Women," Art News, March 1965, p. 37 (text reference) Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Willem de Kooning: Paintings, 1994, fig. 15, p. 15, illustratedExh. Cat., Allan Stone Gallery, Willem de Kooning:Liquefying Cubism, 1994, p. VII, illustrated (installation photograph from the 1965 De Kooning/Cornell exhibition)
Exh. Cat., Museum of Modern Art, Willem de Kooning: A Retrospective, 2011, fig. 7, p. 356, illustrated.
John Elderfield, “de Kooning: A Retrospective,” Museum of Modern Art – New York, 2011- 2012, p. 356
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History
Willem de Kooning is one of the most celebrated American artists, not least for his pioneering work developing the Abstract Expressionist movement. Emerging from the destruction of World War II, the loosely associated movement worked through the trauma of the past and the anxiety of a new present. Along with Jackson Pollock, De Kooning helped to cultivate the action painting branch in which artists appeared to attack the canvas with bold and dynamic brushwork.
Nevertheless, this label of abstraction never sat well with de Kooning as figuration always played a role in his process, ebbing and flowing at various points in the 1930s and 1940s. Thus, it was his first Woman series in the early 1950s that cemented de Kooning’s legacy. With this series, de Kooning fused the techniques of Abstract Expressionism with representative figuration.
Despite this leap in art history, the series was not without controversy. For some, it was a betrayal of the tenets of abstraction. For others, it was the grotesqueness of the women that seemed degrading and violent. But it was Clement Greenberg, the art critic that defined and promoted Abstract Expressionism, who championed this series; for the critic, de Kooning pushed modernism by imbuing abstraction with “the power of sculptural color.” The bold brushstrokes and expressive colors seem to carve out the women on the canvas while conveying a sense of energy that captured the anxieties of the artist and of the times.
Rather than break with art history, the Woman series rooted itself within a lineage of artists painting women (and particularly nude women). For example, both de Kooning and Picasso reimagined the female form and developed new approaches to brushwork, yet maintained a link to the history of female nudes. And like Picasso, de Kooning deconstructed conventional notions of proportion, tossing aside geometry for closer psychological examinations and boundary-pushing technique that explored the possibility of the visual plane.
MoreTop Results at Auction




Comparable Paintings Sold at Auction

- Like “Woman in Rowboat” this is a highly desirable “Woman” subject
- Also executed on paper and laid to a support
- Comparable size

- This work measures a mere 9 x 6 inches but achieved the staggering sum of 6.4 million USD because of the importance of the Woman subject and period
- This painting is quite small, and a work on paper
- This result is one of the highest prices paid per square inch for any abstract painting in history

- This work is also an oil on paper laid down to Masonite
- Comparable date of execution
- Another example from de Kooning’s “Woman” series
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