Willem de Kooning, Untitled XVI, 1985

03 December 2024

Throughout his career, which lasted from the late 1920s to the early 1990s, Willem de Kooning’s painting practice was defined not by a single formal or conceptual quality, but by the artist’s enduring sense of invention.

After moving to America from Rotterdam in his early 20s, de Kooning found himself at the centre of the New York School alongside practitioners such as Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko. What set him apart from his contemporaries was his refusal to settle into one particular style; his work’s defining characteristic, if it could be said to have one, was its unpredictability. As he liked to put it, “I have to change to stay the same.”^[1]

His early paintings, full of movement and bravado, cemented his reputation early in his career. From this point, his style and subject matter shifted regularly. Looking back on the many distinct periods of de Kooning’s career, pure abstraction is juxtaposed with rough figuration, each body of work forming a renewed commitment to his simple constitution of perpetual development.

In 1980, at the age of 75, the artist redirected his style once more towards a more elegant and measured approach to abstraction. Whilst much of his earlier work was visceral and dynamic, drawing the mind to the movement of a body engaged in the physical act of painting, the paintings of this late period were more meticulous in their execution. They betrayed an interest in the way that space, line, colour, shape and space unfold and intersect on the canvas, emphasising both colourful forms and the voids around them.

In a recent essay on de Kooning’s late paintings, the artist Jenny Saville describes how “white paint becomes the carrier of space. He tries to give form to nothingness [...] Everything’s flowing and on the move. You can never quite fix your coordinates. It’s like he’s painting the offcuts or the space around Matisse’s cutouts.”^[2]

Untitled XVI, painted in the middle of his last decade of work, retains something of a young de Kooning, the artist’s hand visible in its channels of red, yellow and green. Its composition is also familiar, his mastery of negative space bringing a sense of tension and release. It is also, though, undoubtedly indebted to the elegant simplicity of European Modernism that de Kooning would have encountered over the course of his career.

De Kooning’s post-1980 paintings are considered some of the most important in his oeuvre. A number of comparable works were shown at The Museum of Modern Art in a survey of his late work in 1997, and again in a major retrospective in 2011-2. One painting from this exhibition, Untitled XIX (1983) is also part of the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, one of the world’s most concise and important collections of contemporary art.

Like many of his best late works, this piece bears the mark of an artist who, though committed to constant reinvention, never lost his unique voice.