Willem De Kooning (1904-1997), Woman in Landscape (circa 1968)

Lot 143. signed 'de Kooning' (lower right) - oil on paper laid down on board - 29¾ x 40¼ in. (75.6 x 102.3 cm.) - Painted circa 1968. Estimate : 800,000 - 1,200,000 U.S. dollars

Provenance : Andrew Crispo Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1977

Note : It can be said of New York City that it endows its inhabitants with a Promethean spirit; an insatiable and restless energy that generates the dizzying speed of metropolitan life. For the first three decades of his career, it is this spirit that Willem de Kooning unconsciously depicted with a violent and gritty style, so beautiful for its capacity to arrest the fugitive passions of the harsh urban existence. However, in 1962, eight months after the death of Franz Kline, the Museum of Modern Art opened a retrospective for Arshile Gorky, de Kooning's early mentor and friend, whose death he'd suffered almost ten years earlier. The nostalgia aroused by the two events created a kind of bittersweet beginning to a new decade, personal loss was the unsolicited bedfellow of professional success. Simultaneously Pop became en vogue-a movement conspicuously reactionary in its sensibilities to the work of de Kooning and artists like Kline and Gorky. Undoubtedly in search of consolation, de Kooning retreated to the studio in the winter of 1963; he had not completed a major work in three years. Pastorale, the vast 70 x 80 inch work he painted in those cold winter months was the artist's first response to this tumult of the early sixties, and it was emblematic of a new phase in his work. The characteristic aggression of de Kooning's brushstroke was granted a softer touch, as his palette gave way to more romantic tonalities. The lyrical blend of pink, yellow, and white coupled with the absence of any landscape and figuration reduce the title to its conceptual base-the pastoral scene as a distant even abstract realm of freedom and fantasy for the urban bourgeois. It seems that in the act of painting that winter, as de Kooning explored this gentler style, so too did he resolve his own internal struggles. By the springtime the artist had decided to leave New York City; in March de Kooning moved permanently to a shingled home in the Springs on Long Island, embracing the vision of change depicted in Pastorale.

The move to the Springs allowed de Kooning to escape the claustrophobia of his own celebrity and once again submerge himself in his painting. Though the change of scenery signified both a personal and artistic rupture with the past, de Kooning would not entirely leave the city behind him. Shortly after his arrival, he began by painting a number of figurative compositions, thereby initiating a dialogue with his earlier and perhaps most famous work, the iconic Women series.

One of several paintings de Kooning executed on the particular theme, Woman in Landscape, portrays a very different kind of woman than those found in his work of the fifties. No longer sporting a maniacal toothy grin, the female form has a svelte femininity that is in sharp contrast to the brooding aggression of a work like Woman I. In Woman in Landscape the figure seems to offer herself; however de Kooning has left her faceless, a kind of surface of inscription upon which the viewer's fantasies will find their own purchase and perhaps endow her with a sense of vulnerable innocence or sexual vibrancy. The work is also a tour de force for de Kooning's use of color; the uplifting hues of blue, green, yellow and red imbue the scene with a bucolic joie de vivre that harkens back to Matisse's early fauvist works and instills in the image a notion of prelapsarian paradise. This invocation of mythology and allegory is stretched to its limits through de Kooning's compositional choices; he intentionally fuses body and landscape, obliterating the traditional figure/ground separation, and welcoming the metaphorical implications of 'mother earth' and divine femininity. Though the canvas still exhibits de Kooning's impulsive bold brushstrokes, they seem guided by a joyous and lustful instinct; one in which the viewer is invited to greedily partake. The canvas emanates a celebratory and liberated temperament-yes, the "King of 10th street" had abdicated his thrown, but he had hardly relinquished his imperial touch.

Christies. Post-War & Contemporary Art. 13-14 Novembre 2007.  20 Rockfeller Plazza. New York - www.christies.com