A Tree in Naples
Willem de Kooning. A Tree in Naples. 1960. Oil on canvas, 6' 8 1/4" x 70 1/8" (203.7 x 178.1 cm). The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection. © 2013 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Willem de Kooning. A Tree in Naples. 1960. Oil on canvas, 6' 8 1/4" x 70 1/8" (203.7 x 178.1 cm). The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection. © 2013 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
This work belongs to a group of abstractions inspired by the landscape. In them de Kooning simplified his visual vocabulary to a few powerful, expansive brushstrokes that evoke the vistas of color found in the natural world. He described the experience that inspired these works: “Just coming around roads, some place, and having the sensation of a piece of it, a piece of nature, like a fence, something on the road. And I really get very elated by again looking, by again seeing that the sky is blue, that the grass is green.”