- Title
- Montauk Highway
- Date Made
- 1958
- Medium
- Oil and combined media on heavy paper mounted to canvas
- Dimensions
- 59 x 48 in. (149.9 x 121.9 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.90.13
- Collecting Area
- Modern Art
- Curatorial Notes
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.
- Selected 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Copyright
- © The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
