Willem de Kooning (1904-1997)

A brilliant achievement in virtuosic line, Willem de Kooning’s Untitled (Two Women) exemplifies the artist’s long-term investigation of femininity in the modern era. His confident bravado can be seen in the frenetic layers of graphite in varying degrees of depth. Two powerful and sensational figures, with accentuated and abstracted breasts and hips, dominate the foreground of the composition, poised before a bridge whose forms allude to the architecture of a bustling cosmopolitan city. What sets the work apart from other Woman drawings is this allusion to a landscape – by adorning the edge of the picture plane with a bridge, he perhaps references the transient nature of his travels to and from Greenwich Village and East Hampton, while also experimenting with the formal qualities of landscape painting. Executed at the height of the artist’s career in the late 1950s, Untitled (Two Women) not only demonstrates the artist’s devotion to female figuration, but also underscores the value he placed on the art of drawing. His sketches often acted as a starting point for his larger paintings, and “...often brutal, sometimes lyrical, the drawings are replete with the same frenzied brushstrokes of the paintings” (D. Waldman, Willem de Kooning in East Hampton, exh. cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1978, p. 18). This powerful and iconic drawing surely exhibits de Kooning’s dedication to the celebrated series of works that have now defined his career.