Nasher Sculpture Center

In the sculptural oeuvre of Willem de Kooning, produced almost entirely between 1965 and 1974, the Nasher collection Hostess of 1973 along with the Clamdigger and Figure Seated on a Bench of 1972 and the Large Torso of 1974 stand as his major accomplishments. Initially uncomfortable with modeling in clay, in 1969 de Kooning began to work in an Italian foundry where he made a number of small bronzes. He soon expanded to a larger scale and developed an exaggerated gestural style that parallels the expressive facture of his paintings and drawings. In the Hostess, anatomical forms are squeezed, gouged, and freely reconfigured with an abandon that capitalizes fully on the soft, extrudable quality of wet clay. Both the style and caricatural aspect of Honoré Daumier's sculptures are recalled, but they are forced to new limits. The bizarre, "tortured" creature that results can be interpreted as threatening or demonic. Peter Schjeldahl has described her as "a loitering figure with three or four arms, upthrust nose and gash of a mouth emitting an almost audible whinnying laugh"; she is "possessed by energies quite beyond rational comprehension" and can be seen as "the desctructive aspect of the Great Mother-the Hindu goddess Kali, perhaps-in contemporary guise, a Maenad of the cocktail lounge" (De Kooning: Drawings/ Sculptures, 1974, p. 21). Savagery, however, may have less to do with the figure than jocularity, her rolling contours perhaps materializing the convulsions of laughter with childlike, haptic spontaneity.

De Kooning had the Hostess cast at Modern Art Foundry, New York, in an edition of seven with two artist's proofs. Although the sculpture has been widely exhibited, it has been impossible to determine in which exhibitions, if any, this particular cast appeared prior to 1980 when the Nashers acquired it.