Alongside Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning has long been considered one of the twin pillars of abstract expressionism. But his most cited works, his Woman series of six canvases, are figurative, not abstract, though they’re plenty expressionist. If it’s true abstraction you’re after, look no further than his ribbon paintings of the 1980s. Cool colors and an emphasis on negative space reflect sobriety and comfortable rural living in the Hamptons. But even here, if you look close enough, you’ll find figurative elements.
“It highlights the cyclical nature of his practice hovering between abstraction and figuration, which he never abandoned,” curator Cecilia Alemani tells Observer about her show, “Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting” at Gagosian’s Chelsea gallery. “I tried to create a dialog starting from the forties to the eighties.”
De Kooning constantly references his earlier works, which he kept next to his easel while he painted. If he didn’t have the original on hand, he made photocopies of images. A long-time alcoholic, it wasn’t his razor-sharp memory that repeated a graceful arc or contour on the tip of his brush. And it wasn’t muscle memory either. He used vellum, traced and cut against earlier paintings, importing lines and shapes to later works.
“I like the idea of searching for the figures, especially in the 1980s paintings. They’re considered pure abstraction, but as soon as you start reading them through this system of forms, you actually recognize an elbow, a foot, a torso,” Alemani says of the show, which includes two from the Woman series. “I was looking for thematic memory in works that are seemingly abstract.”
The wavy arms of Untitled XIV from 1986 echo the outspread limbs of Standing Figure, a massive bronze sculpture. These, along with the flesh-colored dysmorphic shapes of Montauk II from 1969, or the hint of a facial profile in …Whose Name Was Writ in Water, painted six years later, illustrate Alemani’s theory.
The child of a broken home in Rotterdam, de Kooning left school in 1916 to apprentice in a commercial artist firm, attending night classes at the Academie van Beeldende Kunsten en Technische Wetenschappen (later renamed in his honor). He came to the U.S. as a stowaway, hoping to become a magazine illustrator. Within a year, he landed in Manhattan, supporting his art habit with carpentry and side gigs doing illustrations. As he became a fixture in the art scene, he counted Arshile Gorky as a mentor.
“With Gorky you can certainly see the influence in the use of the line,” says Alemani. “The painting in the show called ‘Bill-Lee’s Delight’ from 1946 (oil on paper mounted on masonite), you see Gorky, you see Picasso, some surrealism. That’s a very special painting that talks about the influence Gorky had.”
Beyond the Woman series, the distaff half figures prominently in de Kooning’s practice. Who is pictured is anyone’s guess since he insisted they’re not portraits of people he knew. “They’re actually self-portraits of him, not Elaine (his wife), or other partners he had,” notes Alemani. “I think he was looking at the image of women he saw in the American consumerist society around billboards and magazines, especially in the post-war period. I think that was a bigger influence.”
Elaine de Kooning was also a painter. Together, they fought the bottle and each other amid the besotted jealousy of an open marriage. She left him in 1957 after 14 years, but came back into his life in 1976. “They weren’t a couple anymore, but she really helped him,” says Alemani. “I think that’s why he made many more paintings than in previous decades.”
His output is prolific, but his sculptures are few. While visiting an artist friend in Rome who had access to a foundry, de Kooning made some figures, two of which are in the show—Clamdigger, a human-sized piece from 1972—and Standing Figure, a large-scale bronze made over 15 years beginning in 1969.
“When he painted, he would scrape here, scratch there, erase the composition every single day,” Alemani says of de Kooning’s tortured process. “But with clay, you can go back and completely remodel it the following day. I think he enjoyed the materiality of sculpture. ‘Standing Figure’ is impressive indoors because it’s meant for outdoors, and it’s the first time in thirty years it has been brought in. I think it does something really special to the paintings. There is something sensual and physical about having that giant object in the space.”
Some of de Kooning’s paintings have sold for record prices. In 2006, David Geffen sold Woman III for $137.5 million. He later sold Interchange for $300 million, the highest price paid for a painting until Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi fetched $450 million at auction in 2017.
The Gagosian show includes six paintings made in the 1980s, the latest from 1986. Before his death 11 years later, it was revealed that he suffered from Alzheimer’s, starting in the 1980s.
“He lived such a long life,” Alemani says of the artist, who died at age 92. “He went through so many different periods and eras. I sometimes think the discussions about him get stuck on the Woman series. But his compositions are so sophisticated and powerful, the way he scraped the canvas each night and the layering, the technical aspects and the general composition and the mastery of color and light… It’s said that he enjoyed being in the studio, alone with his paintings.”
“Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting” is showing through June 14, 2025, at Gagosian’s 555 West 24th Street gallery.
