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A Tree in Naples

This work belongs to a group of abstractions inspired by the landscape. In them de Kooning simplified his visual vocabulary to a few powerful, expansive brushstrokes that evoke the vistas of color found in the natural world. He described the experience that inspired these works: “Just coming around roads, some place, and having the sensation of a piece of it, a piece of nature, like a fence, something on the road. … And I really get very elated by again looking, by again seeing that the sky is blue, that the grass is green.”

By the late 1950s, de Kooning had turned away from the urban crush of Manhattan. In 1959, he purchased land in the hamlet of Springs, Long Island, where he lived from 1963...

1960
Oil on canvas
203.7 x 178.1cm
622.1967
Image © 2019 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Text © MoMA - Museum of Modern Art, New York

Where you'll find this

The Museum of Modern Art
Permanent collection