Sidney Janis Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1963

New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, Recent Paintings by Willem de Kooning, March 1962, cat. no. 37, illustrated

Newsweek, March 12, 1962, p. 100, illustrated (incorrectly titled)

This work is in very good condition overall. The sheet has discolored slightly with age. There is evidence of light wear and handling along the edges. The colors are bright, fresh and clean. There is light evidence of foxing throughout the sheet. Framed under Plexiglas.
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.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

“Do things here and now, not after you’re gone.  If you have some money, share it.  And if you have some time, do something worthwhile.”  Jerome H. Stone

Jerome H. Stone, businessman, civic leader and collector, epitomized the varied sentiments of this personal motto throug🎶hout his long and storied 101-year life.  A precocious and intellectually curious child of Russian Jewish immigrants in Chicago, Mr. Stone worked tirelessly to help support his family.  His energies succeeded in turning a simple family corrugated box business into a multi-billion dollar firm, Stone Container Cor🎀poration.

With the same vigor, Mr. Stone turned his private attentions to the public institutions that had nurtured both his own personal development and that of the city around him.  Impressed that the local Roosevelt University had developed a curriculum of classes tailored to working adult students, Mr. Stone joined the Board of Trustees in 1953 and served as i🍎ts chairman from 1969 through 1984.  🐼His passion for Chicago, art and culture compelled him to be a primary fundraiser in the efforts to build the current Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, helping to fundamentally transform the institution into the architectural and civic landmark it is today.

However, Mr. Stone’s most significant and perhaps lasting contribution was for the most personal and poignant of reason🐈s.  While a teenager, Mr. Stone was presented to a sophisticated, well-traveled young woman named Evelyn, who had been the valedictorian of her high school class, was fluent in several languages and was a skilled violinist and pianist.  Evelyn would later become his wife and the mother of his three children, and together in their home the couple would build an outstanding Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art collection celebrating bold colors, graphic lines and industrial energy.

Unfortunately, and tragically, at the prime of both Mr. Stone’s personal and professional successes, Evelyn was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, then a little-understood condition.  Mr. Stone “watched with deep frustration as the mysterious disease took hold of his wife, hollowing out a woman who had once brimmed with talent and a zest for life.”  At the time of her diagnosis, there was little information on Alzheimer’s available even amongst the medical community.  Mr. Stone researched the disease himself and served alongside Evelyn’s caregivers until her death in 1983 at the age of 64.  In 1979, Mr. Stone was invited to a meeting of other support groups interested in creating a broader organization for families and to promote research.  At this meeting, he saw “the kernel of a national organization;” and on December 4, 1979🐭, at the first official meeting of the💧 Alzheimer’s Association, Mr. Stone was elected the founding president.

What began as a grassroots organization based originally in New York quickly became a leading research association, reaching millions of people affected by Alzheimer’s across the globe.  To broaden the awareness of the disease, leaders of the organization reached out to lawmakers in Washington about Alzheimer’s issues.  In 1982, Mr. Stone “proudly stood beside President Reagan as he signed legislation designating Thanksgiving Week as National Alzheimer’s Disease Awareness Week,” an observance that continues today.  With Mr. Stone at the helm and with the benefit of his fundraising acumen ꦇand personal connection to the cause, the Association has expanded into the scientific arena🎶.  Today, the Alzheimer’s Association is a leading voluntary health organization in Alzheimer’s care, support and research.

Harry Johns, Alzheimer’s Association president and CEO, noted that “It takes a unique individual, one that only comes along every so often, to be able to create an organization like ours that is s🌞o significant to so many people.”  Over the course of more than a century of family life, business achievement and philanthro♐pic endeavors, Jerome H. Stone’s career and personal accomplishments are the very embodiment of worthwhile, and nothing short of extraordinary.

“Compared with his earlier canvases, the paintings of the 1960s show gains in rhythm, luminosity, and surface vibration through the quiver of his line aဣnd the c﷽hromatics of his reds, pinks, greens, and white. As in the past, de Kooning keeps gambling with the possible destruction of each work-in-progress by holding it open to associations that spring up in the course of its creation. Some of the paintings…are among the most lyrical creations of the century.” Harold Rosenberg

Exuding unrivalled intellectual and painterly command, Willem de Kooning’s remarkable work on paper Woman VII exemplifies the series that remains the artist’s most important painterly triumph. De Kooning famously stated that “flesh was the reason oil painting was invented,” and indeed, this famous declaration from 1950 is readily evidenced in Woman VII, in which luscious strokes of vibrant colors and fluid forms evoke a sensibility that is at once abstract, primal, raw, and sensual. Archetypal as a work on paper from de Kooning’s most renowned series of Woman paintings, the present work articulates the female form in a provocatively abstract manner, evokes a sensuality that compounds figuration with the cubist significations of the body as invented by Picasso. While flesh dematerializes into paint, hints of the woman’s features remain as tantalizing glimpses of de Kooning's muse, often in the form of golden hair and here particularly betokened by luscious brushstrokes that caress the curvature of her female body parts in a fluid and suggestive manner. Executed just two years before de Kooning moved permanently away from New York City to East Hampton, Woman VII possesses the same vigor as his earlier Women while clearly anticipating the softer, more liquid handling of paint that would⛎ define his 🌳style of the later 1960s.

Here, the central figure of the peachy fleshed woman seems to recede into her surrounding landscape, bordered by dynamic swaths of bright yellows, blues, and deep greens that evoke the pastoral landscape of field and sea. As is typical with works of the later 1960s, de Kooning flirted with the limits of abstraction, pushing the boundaries as far as possible while still retaining distinct subject matter. The heroine’s fleshy body melts into the surrounding landscape, but simultaneously projects a sense of tactile sensuality, harking back to the voluptuous female portraits of Peter Paul Rubens and the Old Masters. In a 1960 interview with David Sylvester, just one year before the present work was executed, de Kooning noted: “The Women had to do with the female painted through all the ages, all those idols, and maybe I was stuck to a certain extent; I couldn’t go on” (Barbara Hess, de Kooning, Los Angeles, 2007, p. 33). In its expressionist abandon and strokes of paint that burst forth from the central figure to meet the edges of the paper, Woman VII thrillingly verges on violence, whil🧸e simultaneously evoking an increased sereni♊ty in her upright stance and cushioned forms. De Kooning’s genius here rests in the spectacular conflation of freedom and unrestraint with total painterly control.

The anthropomorphic form reveals de Kooning’s heightened interest in geometry, virtually dissecting the human body into its constituent parts, while revealing a more intimate interest in the fluidity of the artist’s brush and its relation to the contours of the female body. Strong formal comparison may be drawn between Woman VII and Picasso’s pictures of female figures. De Kooning was reluctant to be affiliated solely with the New York school of Action Painters or to define Abstract Expressionist painting as a school; however, he insisted on his respect for Cubism: "of all movements I like Cubism most. It had that wonderful unsure atmosphere of reflection – a poetic frame where something could be possible, where an artist could practice intuition. It didn't want to get rid of what went before. Instead it added something to it. The parts I can appreciate in other movements came out of Cubism" (Willem de Kooning, The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, Vol. 18, No. 3, Spring 1951, p. 7). In the winter of 1934 Pablo Picasso famously wrote: “There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint. It is the object which aroused the artist, stimulated his ideas and set off his emotions. These ideas and emotions will be imprisoned in his work for good” (Richard Friedenthal, Letters of the Great Artists–from Blake to Pollock, London, 1963, pp. 256-57).&nb🌳sp;In spite of this statement, however, it is perhaps ironic that among his many phenomenal achievements, Picasso’s art always remained fundamentally figurative, and that a fuller manifestation of this 1934 statement finally reached an undeniable zenith through the art of Willem de Kooning and his astonishing paintings of women.