Live Auction 10338Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Auction
Willem de Kooning (1904-1997)
Lot 162

Willem de Kooning (1904-1997)

Untitled

Closed12 February 2015

Price Realised

GBP 68,500

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Willem de Kooning (1904-1997)
Untitled
signed and inscribed ‘LOVE BILL’ (lower left)
oil on newspaper
23 x 15in. (58.4 x 38.1cm.)
Executed circa 1976

Collection Richard Hines, Seattle (acquired directly from the artist).
Acquired from the above by the present owner in the early 1980s.

Specialist note

'Because they [the oil transfers] preserve an offset paint image of the picture at a moment of its evolution, de Kooning saved many of them, keeping the sheets scattered on the floor around the painting area, or on the shelves, to be consulted as a record of the changes the painting had gone through. They became a kind of secret visual diary, fragile evidences of the creative and destructive stages of the work in progress'
(T.B. Hess, ‘De Kooning’s new Women’, in Artnews, vol. 64, no. 1, March 1965, p. 20).