Sheet of Woman Studies

The present grouping of works by Willem de Kooning hails from the personal collection of one of the greatest examiners of twentieth-century art: Günther Förg. Across this remarkable, intimate assembly, de Kooning explores the human figure – the form that lay behind even his most abstract visions – in five charcoal and pencil drawings, and bursts into Abstract Expressionist mastery in Untitled (1977), lot 20, an unmistakable profusion of marbled oil paint on newspaper. Testament to Förg’s keen eye and to de Kooning’s graphic and painterly command, these works offer a rare insight into an exchange of ideas from one titan of art history to another.

Förg and de Kooning may appear unlikely bedfellows. Förg came to prominence as a rigorous dismantler of painterly traditions in 1980s Cologne, exploring the foundations of the medium in a highly conceptual, postmodern practice. De Kooning’s voluptuous and emotive brushwork was at the vanguard of Abstract Expressionism in mid-century America, leading painting in a bold new direction whose invention, ambition and sincerity seem to belong to a very different era. In fact, the two artists share perhaps surprising common ground.

Förg did not merely dissect the works of his forebears: he admired them. He cross-examined painting as a problematic genre, culling tropes of colour, composition and gesture from their place in traditional Modernist narratives. More complex than pastiche, his works variously interrogate, appropriate and are influenced by his predecessors’ ideas. He was particularly fascinated by the work of the Abstract Expressionists, transposing their concerns into his famous ‘lead paintings’, which sidestepped metaphysical ideas to foreground the material presence of the artwork. Förg’s own collection testifies to a deep intellectual and emotional involvement with the art of the recent past. One can imagine him engaged in close, searching study across the present selection of works, following the lines, forms and colours of de Kooning’s hand.

While typically working in an abstract idiom, de Kooning always returned to the figure. As Sheet of Woman Studies (1965), lot 67, Head (1965), lot 19, and Untitled (Woman) (1970), lot 66, attest, the female form held continual fascination for him long after his celebrated Woman paintings of the early 1950s. De Kooning famously claimed that ‘flesh is the reason oil paint was invented’, and the fertile presence of the human body resounds through even his most freeform paintings. The peach tones and ocean-and-sky blues of Untitled (1977), lot 20, reflect the romantic waterside themes of his final two decades, when he lived and worked by the sea in East Hampton, Long Island.

While sometimes seen as aridly theoretical, Förg’s approach was in fact underpinned by a similar haptic joy in the act of creation, and gained great richness from the shifting, variation and cross-pollination of ideas. ‘Really, painting should be sexy’, he once said. ‘It should be sensual. These are things that will always escape the concept’ (G. Förg, quoted in D. Ryan, ‘Talking Painting: Interview with Günther Förg Karlsruhe 1997’, http://www.david-ryan.co.uk/Gunther%20Forg.html). Painting, for Förg, was far from dead. His postmodern inquisitions were laced with an almost classical reverence for his medium. Ultimately, Förg’s works united the conceptual with the physically sensuous; the same marriage, as these works reveal, lay at the heart of de Kooning’s practice.
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