Sidney Janis Gallery, New York
Private Collection, St. Louis

New York, Allan Stone Gallery, Willem de Kooning: Liquifying Cubism, October 1994 - January 1995, p. 46, illustrated in color
Miami, Art Basel, Allan Stone Gallery, Willem de Kooning: Slipping Glimpses 1920s to 1960s, December 2006, p. 25, illustrated in color

It Is, Spring 1958, pl. 9, illustrated
Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning, New York, 1959, pl. 2 , p. 34, illustrated
Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh, De Kooning, New York, 1960, no. 32, illustrated
Exh. Cat., Cedar Falls, The Gallery of Art at the University of Northern Iowa (and traveling), De Kooning 1969-78, 1978, fig. 1, p. 11, illustrated 
Art News, February 2004, p. 37, illustrated in color (installation photograph in an advertisement  for the Allan Stone Gallery)

This work is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at 212-606-7254 for a condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The work is framed in a dark stained wood frame.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Willem de Kooning is an iconic figure in the history of American art, celebrated as one of the two scions of the Abstract Expressionist movement that transformed the character and direction of painting in their time and beyond. As artist and personality, he bridged the gap between the Apollonian reserve of Mark Rothko, the naturalist grandeur of Franz Kline and the Dionysian abandon of Jackson Pollock. His oeuvre would span more decades than his colleagues which allowed him a more extensive chronology of development and discovery, as well as a lengthy record of interacting with subsequent generations of artists. In hindsight, the viewer can witness de Kooning constantly vary his pictorial syntax in an ongoing decades-long dialogue between the two canons of painterly invention: figuration and abstraction. De Kooning's compositions and linear expressiveness document a continuous fluctuation between the two, allowing him to create a momentous oeuvre that is a treatise on the challenge of abstraction. In each decade of de Kooning's oeuvre, the figure would cyclically emerge, melt into and then re-emerge from its background.  Forest of Zogbaum of 1958 belongs to the realm of de Kooning's landscape abstractions and celebrates one of the moments when the artist's painterly joy and gestural strokes dominate and almost eliminate figuration or ♌objective art.

The product of a wholly abstract vocabulary, Forest of Zogbaum embraces the historical tradition of pastoral landscape in a newer, artistic dialect. Rich with incident and joyous color, Forest of Zogbaum summarized recent achievements yet is prescient of future abstractions of the late 1960s and 1970s. Just prior to Forest of Zogbaum, the female figure had emerged transcendent in Woman I (1950-1952, Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York) and her sister paintings. These goddesses then give way to (and finally become) their backgrounds, and the urban cityscapes of abstract forms in the mid-1950s such as Interchange and Police Gazette, both of 1955, become both background and foreground, sending the entire pictorial field into flux. These paintings seem to buzz with the frenetic pace of life in a major metropolis. From these urban cityscapes, de Kooning's more pastoral landscapes such as Forest of Zogbaum emerge, with his brushwork now more amplified, looser and more open. Liberated from the constrictions of the city, de Kooning's attention to light is more profound and the frenzied proliferation of stroke, form and plane has now been reduced. As Henry Geldzahler wrote, paintings of this period "are packed with shapes, allusions, actions and counteractions, they pile ambiguity on ambiguity; sometimes, it would seem, they are painted at lightning speed, at others in a more relaxed, contour-loving gesture." (Exh. Cat., New York, Gagosian Gallery, Willem de Kooning: Abstract Landscapes, 1955-1963, 1987, n.p.).

This broad simplification of composition is matched by a reduction of palette to royal blue, sunlit gold, creamy white and organic brown, exuberantly deployed by de Kooning in Forest of Zogbaum and the other landscapes of the late 1950s such as Ruth's Zowie and Bolton Landing of 1957. This new expansiveness and infused glow is related to de Kooning's gradual and eventual move from New York City to the countryside of Long Island. After the success of his 1956 exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery, de Kooning gained some financial security while losing some of the private solitude that nurtures artists. He began to escape from the city, first by summering in East Hampton and then eventually moving there wholesale in 1961, and this relocation to a landscape reminiscent of his native country infused his paintings from now on.  Color became dominant in works such as Forest of Zogbaum, and the picture plane flattens, demonstrating once again in de Kooning's work that abstraction and objective painting could co-exist in a dynamic relationship. As Diane Waldman observed, compositions began "....to blur the distinction between the vertical structure of the city and the horizontal configuration of the country." (Diane Waldman, Willem de Kooning, New York, 1988, p. 105). Thomas B. Hess, de Kooning's great friend and supporter, noted the changes in de Kooning's pictorial vocabulary that are so amply evident in Forest of Zogbaum: "...shapes are reduced to wide, smooth areas ...yellow makes a heavy accent ...Forms become larger, more simple, and continuous; colors become fewer in number, cleaner, more intense, and more concentrated on primary contrasts." (Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning, New York, 1969, pp. 102-103).

The artist's technique, brushwork and use of color are dazzling in Forest of Zogbaum. Broad sweeps of yellow, blue and brown create a vortex of color with an extraordinary bravura. The inspiration of his surroundings is unmistakable as a sense of sunlight exudes from this work. The title may refer to de Kooning's friend and fellow artist, Wilfrid Zogbaum, who was also a resident of the Hamptons and part of the growing artist's community in the area. In fact, de Kooning purchased over four acres in the Springs from Zogbaum in 1959. Yet, it is inaccurate to view the so-called Parkway Landscapes of the late 1950s as observations from nature or as representations of the sites witnessed by the artist as he drove to and from Long Island. Paintings such as Forest of Zogbaum are more concerned with the nature of painting ꧂as a means to translate the emotions engendered by de Kooning's new environment on𝓀to canvas. The selective palette, muscular gestures and frontal configuration emphasize the texture of paint and the artist's luxuriant celebration of his medium.