[No Title] (1970-1977)

In this unfinished work, charcoal lines map out a fragmented body—as abbreviated and disparately scaled as it may be. Shapes resemble limbs and fingers; ribbons form a distorted face; and a sleeved arm reaches down the center of the piece. This sleeve seems synecdochic for the whole composition—while abstract as isolated marks, these strokes establish form, gesture and content. Extended linear accents punctuate the canvas, like shorthand for anatomical elements that both demarcate the figure and move spontaneously across the surface in contrast to this depictive function. In this tumbling, top-loaded and tangled network of fractured parts, the figure survives the turbulence of de Kooning’s gestural abstraction, which simultaneously figures and disfigures its forms.

A longer discussion of this painting can be found here.