Willem de Kooning

During his long career, de Kooning made several radical stylistic shifts. In the 1940s, somber black-and-white abstractions ceded to powerful, sometimes ferocious women. These were followed by serene pastoral landscapes of the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1980s, he abandoned his luscious surfaces of thick impasto for luminous expanses of pastel-imbued whites, overlaid with ribbons of vivid color. This work may be understood as a logical refinement of, rather than a break with, the subjects and forms of his prior explorations, including body and landscape. Throughout, de Kooning’s dexterous manipulations of paint yielded works that teemed with the energy of his surroundings, including a gritty 1940s Manhattan and the bucolic ocean vistas of eastern Long Island. Applying paint with a brush or a scraper’s knife, he rendered the physical form either as a subtle body fragment or as a more raucous figure, declaring that “flesh was the reason oil paint was invented.” Paintings from the eighties juxtaposed with works from preceding decades reveal many formal relationships, as well as trace an evolution from the densely layered surfaces of the late seventies and early eighties to the clean, crisp lines of the mid-eighties and the rich, ebullient compositions of the artist’s final working years. gagosian Gallery