Willem de Kooning
Montauk Highway1958

On view:

Broad Contemporary Art Museum, floor 3

Artist or Maker: Willem de Kooning
Netherlands, active United States, 1904-1997
Title: Montauk Highway
Place Made: Holland
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)
Credit Line: Gift from the Michael and Dorothy Blankfort Collection in honor of the museum's twenty-fifth anniversary
Accession Number: M.90.13
Classification: Paintings
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: Barron, Stephanie. Acknowledgments, or Every Label Tells a Story. Los Angeles: Art Catalogues: LACMA, 2017.