We are pleased to announce the placement of "Woman" (1952) by Willem de Kooning into an important private collection.
This graphite drawing on paper, numbered 45 in the artist's hand and signed at lower center, belongs to the pivotal sequence of works produced by de Kooning (1904–1997) in the early 1950s in parallel with the monumental painted Women series, exhibited at Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, in 1953. That exhibition marked a watershed in postwar American art: widely contested as a return to figuration at the height of Abstract Expressionist dominance, the Women canvases demonstrated de Kooning's refusal to accept the opposition of figuration and abstraction as anything other than artificial. The drawings produced alongside the paintings are inseparable from that achievement, serving as the laboratory in which the pictorial vocabulary of the series was discovered, tested, and pushed.
For de Kooning, drawing was never preparatory but a mode of thinking in its own right. The graphite works of this period share the urgency and formal compression of the canvases while retaining an intimacy and directness that belongs entirely to works on paper. The female figure is simultaneously asserted and dissolved, fractured and reconstituted, oscillating between legibility and abstraction in a process of continual formal negotiation. It is in works at this scale and economy that de Kooning's pictorial intelligence is most nakedly visible, the hand in immediate, unmediated contact with the problem.
The present work carries exceptional provenance: acquired directly from the artist by Priscilla Morgan, New York, it passed into a distinguished private collection before entering the present holding. Works of this historical significance and with a provenance of this proximity to de Kooning's studio are extraordinarily seldom available.
Peder Lund Art Advisory Associates negotiated and finalized this acquisition on behalf of a distinguished private collection.