Montauk Highway

© The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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Montauk Highway

Holland, 1958
Paintings
Oil and combined media on heavy paper mounted to canvas
59 x 48 in. (149.9 x 121.9 cm)
Gift from the Michael and Dorothy Blankfort Collection in honor of the museum's twenty-fifth anniversary (M.90.13)
Modern Art
Currently on public view:
Broad Contemporary Art Museum, floor 3

Since gallery displays may change often, please contact us before you visit to make certain this item is on view.

Label

Montauk Highway demonstrates Willem de Kooning’s signature tension between representation and abstraction....
Montauk Highway demonstrates Willem de Kooning’s signature tension between representation and abstraction. The flat planes of color evoke the open fields and slices of sky in the countryside on the outskirts of New York City, as well as the sensation of speeding through this rural landscape on the highway—even the flash of headlights in the dark.

De Kooning began to spend more time in eastern Long Island in the late 1950s, before permanently moving there in 1961 with his wife, artist Elaine de Kooning. Others who were either permanent residents or summer visitors in this artists’ colony included Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, James Brooks and Charlotte Park, Robert Motherwell, and Grace Hartigan.

Wall label, 2021.
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Bibliography

  • Tuchman, Maurice, editor. New York School, The First Generation: Paintings of the 1940s and 1950s. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1965.

    View this publication in LACMA's Reading Room

  • Blankfort, Michael; Edgerton, Anne Carnegie and MauriceTuchman.  The Michael and Dorothy Blankfort Collection.  Los Angeles:  Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1982.
  • Powell III, Earl A., Robert Winter, and Stephanie Barron. The Robert O. Anderson Building. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986.
  • Los Angeles County Museum of Art Members' Calendar 1990.  vol. 27-28, no. 12-1 (December, 1989-January, 1991).
  • Butler, Cornelia, and Paul Schimmel. Willem de Kooning: Tracing the Figure. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.
  • Barron, Stephanie. Acknowledgments, or Every Label Tells a Story. Los Angeles: Art Catalogues: LACMA, 2017.
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