Untitled

Willem de Kooning established his reputation as a key figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement with a series of black-and-white paintings that he created in the late 1940s using household enamels and paper. With their lyrical brushwork and biometric shapes, these works marked the artist's shift from a representational or figurative drawing style to the new gestural tendencies of the New York School. Once he eliminated color from his palette, de Kooning became more spontaneous with his application of paint, pushing his compositions to the edge of the paper. The resulting works embodied the physical act of painting, a defining characteristic of what would later become termed “action painting.”