A Tree in Naples, 1960 by Willem de Kooning

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. ”
- Willem de Kooning