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WILLEM DE KOONING (1904-1997) UNTITLED oil on canvas 68 1/2 X 77 3/4 IN. (174 X 197.5 CM) painted...

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WILLEM DE KOONING (1904-1997) UNTITLED oil on canvas 68 1/2 X 77 3/4 IN. (174 X 197.5 CM) painted...
WILLEM DE KOONING
(1904-1997)
UNTITLED
oil on canvas
68 1/2 X 77 3/4 IN. (174 X 197.5 CM)
painted in 1971
this work is accompanied by a photo certificate from Lisa de Kooning, the artist's daughter <p>PROVENANCE
Gifted by the artist to James Crandall, the artist's studio assistant, 1975
Private collection, United States
Throughout his artist career, Willem de Kooning added to the vocabulary of painting, challenged perceptions as to what painting represents, and provided a stimulus to respond to art in new ways. From the beginning of his career, de Kooning realized that "reality" is so multifarious and full of contradictions that any portrayal of it had to be equally complex. De Kooning translated this consciousness in his art through the continual movement and struggle of the painted image between abstraction and representation; de Kooning's paintings of the early 1970s, specifically UNTITLED, 1971, are a case in point. In Untitled, each new constellation of gestures opens a new set of possibilities, as the recombinations of various modes of the brushstroke struggle to be free of any association; the viewer strives to follow each brushstroke as it seeks to be a "figure," and then watches its heroic denial of such a correlation; the brushstrokes seem to evoke a memory of figuration, as they reach toward abstraction. It is the struggle of the brushstroke to both remember figuration and yet to assert its independence form representation.
As de Kooning explains, "No object can be tied down to any sort of reality; a stone my be a part of a wall, a piece of sculpture, a lethal weapon, a pebble on a beach, or anything else you like, just as this file in my hand can be metamorphosed into a shoe-horn or a spoon, according to the way in which I use it...So when you ask me whether a particular form in one of my paintings depicts a woman's head, a fish, a vase, a bird or all four at once, I can't give you a categorical answer, for this 'metaphoric' confusion is fundamental to what I am out to express...And then I occasionally introduce forms which have no literal meaning whatsoever. Sometimes these are accidents, which happen to suit my purpose, sometimes "rhymes" which echo other forms, and sometimes rhythmical motifs which help to integrate a composition and give it movement...Objects don't exist for me except insofar as a rapport exists between them and myself" (Willem de Kooning, quoted in B. Rose, DE KOONING/CHAMBERLAIN: INFLUENCE AND TRANSFORMATION, New York, 2001, unpaginated).
De Kooning's abstractions of the 1970s reveal that he has adopted the pictorial vocabulary from his Women paintings of the 1950s and developed it further. It is now the space around the figures that has become the theme in form and content. The women, however, have disappeared in these works, and the rapidity of gestural brushwork has advanced more than ever to the forefront of the image. The engulfing and expanding feel of the pictorial space compels the viewer's eye onward and waywardly, as in UNTITLED, 1971, in an attempt to perceive everything at once, while the viewer may see an apparition of form in the voluptuous color and weaving movement, it is lost a second later in the activity of the whole canvas.
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