Willem de Kooning

Easter Monday, 1955–56. Willem de Kooning. Oil and newspaper transfer on canvas. Rogers Fund, 1956. © 2023 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
A tour de force of de Kooning’s gestural style, Easter Monday bristles with energy. Angled forms and lines collide, overlap, and penetrate one another, while transferred newsprint, particularly visible at the bottom and top right, enforces a tenuous grid-like structure. The work appears to be in simultaneous processes of creation and destruction, a perpetual state of both realization and erasure that finds some analogy in the continuous growth and decay of nature. Named for the day on which de Kooning completed it in 1956, the painting is the largest of ten monumental works he exhibited that spring. Critic Thomas Hess likened the group to "abstract urban landscapes," and Easter Monday does seem to reference the whirling pace and gritty detritus of the modern city.