Latest news with #WillemdeKooning
New York Times
18-07-2025
- New York Times
The Familiar Fingerprints of a Forgotten Art Heist
When Lou Schachter visited the University of Arizona Museum of Art in 2014, he appreciated the flowers by Georgia O'Keeffe, the cityscapes from Edward Hopper and the signature splatter of Jackson Pollock. But he was most intrigued by the empty frame on one of the gallery walls. A small plaque nearby explained that in 1985, someone had cut Willem de Kooning's 'Woman-Ochre' from the frame and made off with it. No one had seen the painting since. Schachter, a corporate consultant with a homespun interest in unsolved mysteries, was fascinated by the story of one person distracting security while another took the abstract oil painting of a nude woman. He loved to write and took notes with the intention of digging into the theft someday. The de Kooning turned up before he got around to it. In 2017, it was discovered hanging behind the bedroom door of Jerome and Rita Alter, retired public schoolteachers who had died. Valued at $400,000 when it was stolen, the painting is now considered worth more than $100 million. After the painting's long restoration process, Schachter got back in his car and drove hundreds of miles from Palm Springs, Calif., to Tucson, Ariz., to see 'Woman-Ochre' where the empty frame had once been. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Telegraph
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
If you see one art show this summer, see this
I believe that Jenny Saville is a genius. Of the 45 works in The Anatomy of Painting, her stunning retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery – maybe the show of the summer – at least a dozen bear that out. Spanning her career from the early 1990s to the present day, the exhibition testifies to a virtuoso's flair. Saville handles form and colour with ease, and brings her subjects to glowing, shifting life. This is portrait painting as electricity. Saville was born in Cambridge in 1970. Her work was spotted by Charles Saatchi in 1992 at a graduation show; he bought her entire collection on the spot. The picture that brought her into the public eye, Propped (1992), faces you as you enter the halls of the NPG. Restlessness jockeys with poise: a large naked woman perches on a skinny pedestal, her head tilted back in the enigmatic expression that would become a Saville favourite. (It's partly a self-portrait, but as with most of her work, there's as much imagination as representation here.) The picture had its critics – fleshy and combative, it wasn't the kind of nude they liked – but 30 years on, it remains a thrill. Saville 's women, especially those from the 1990s, might seem cousins to Lucian Freud's, but she owes more to Willem de Kooning and his angular female forms. 'Flesh,' he once remarked, 'was the reason why oil painting was invented.' Saville saw the Dutch-American's art when she was a student, and has recalled being thunderstruck: 'The paint was right on the surface.' Her work has, ever since, been all on the surface too; perhaps that's true of any painting, but most don't insist so hard on the fact, don't hover so skilfully in our eyeline between nature and artifice – between the picture as a portrait of life and as a mere collection of painted marks. As Saville's career, and the NPG show, reach the early 2000s, we meet a series of giant faces. All are masterfully coloured, yet in different palettes; built around direct gazes, yet in different moods. They conjure intense emotion, but never straightforwardly. I loved Bleach (2008), in which a young woman's head is built up through rippling off-white hues; and Stare (2004-5), used on a Manic Street Preachers album cover, its little boy a landscape of deep red strokes and swells. These faces coalesce, decompose, come together again: you see the pictures themselves as living things. Towards the present, Saville's portraits become glassier, weirder. Chasah (2020) and Prism (2020) combine smooth tones on the skin with zippy squiggles of abstract form. And then you turn, and see the knockout: Rupture (2020), one of the great paintings of our age. A woman's head rises, with eerie serenity, from a spectrum of buzzing colour: yellow glows through her cheeks, her neck boils away into green. One eye appears thin and translucent, while the other has human depth, even tenderness. I began by calling Saville a genius: if you doubt me, go to the NPG and seek out Rupture. What you'll see in those eyes is something else.
Vogue
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
They Grew Up Together in the Hamptons. Now, They're Reshaping the Local Art Scene
The de Kooning Clan 'I just started using color in my drawings,' says Lucy de Kooning Villeneuve, 29, as she leads me through the living room of her childhood home in Springs, the woodsy, low-profile hamlet of East Hampton, New York. She gestures to a stack of pastel watercolors on the coffee table. 'Color is always more fun.' Lucy de Kooning Villeneuve Photo: Alessandra Schade I haven't seen Lucy in over a decade; her white-blond hair, once long and tangled from daily ocean swims, is now straight and cropped at the chin. Her raspy laugh is endearingly familiar, as is the buzz of guests drifting through the open kitchen. It's a cloudless day in May, and she's set up a makeshift studio on the patio: two easels and a low wooden table with bubbling paint tubes and brushes. Lucy is part of a long line of de Koonings who have made art in or around this backyard. Her grandfather Willem de Kooning bought the land in 1963, building a house and studio on a few wild acres off Springs Fireplace Road. On the opposite end of the oak-dotted lawn, his two-story studio still stands, filled with paintings cloaked in plastic wrap. His wife and artistic counterpart, Elaine de Kooning, kept a studio across the narrow harbor in the North West Woods; and Lucy's mother, Lisa de Kooning, sculpted bronze-cast animals—elephants, cows, rams—many of which still keep watch over the house. And then, in high school, it was us—a scruffier coalition of local teen artists who worked across various mediums at the de Kooning residence: sculpture (constructing launch ramps for our skateboards), interior design (holding Lucy upside down to stamp painted footprints on the ceiling), and performance art (how many times could one listen to Carly Rae Jepsen's 'Call Me Maybe'?). Growing up, the de Kooning home became an unofficial meeting ground for creative tomfoolery: Lisa de Kooning was a firm believer in play. 'With my mom, there was always paint, art, animals, and fun,' she says. Lisa adopted all kinds of animals for the property: Sara and Joe, the mini ponies; pigs (Peter, Wilbur, Daisy, and Dude); a Clydesdale named Bubba; and Lulu, a white cockatoo. She also helped turn Lucy's bedroom into what we all called 'the neon room,' a UV-lit sanctuary where friends had free reign to paint on the walls, so long as they didn't tag their names, which was deemed 'boring' by the de Kooning clan.
New York Times
27-03-2025
- General
- New York Times
Corrections: March 27, 2025
An article on Sunday about archival photographs of the Dutch-born artist Willem de Kooning referred incorrectly to de Kooning's time in East Hampton, N.Y., in 1951. Though de Kooning spent time in East Hampton in the early 1950s, he did not yet own a property there. Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions.
