Maritime Administration, U.S. Dept. of Commerce

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An anchor, a ship’s navigation instruments, broken boards, and a figurehead in the shape of a woman are arranged across a sand-colored beach in this horizontal painting. Four panels are joined to create the long composition. The objects are lit from our left, and they cast shadows that stretch across the beach. To our left, a golden-brown anchor sits upright in the sand. A blue and white rope is threaded through the ring at the top and joined to the broken paneling standing in the sand next to the anchor. Six vertical boards are joined to create the paneling, which is streaked with slate-blue and tan, and they nearly span the height of the painting. The couple of boards to our right are smashed through, creating a gaping hole. In front of the paneling, about half the height of the painting, is a gyrocompass with two nested rings around a horizontal bar across the center. It hangs from a blue rope that is looped over a bar at the top of the composition, presumably projecting into the picture from something out of our sight. An upside-down, V-shaped compass and an open book with ripped pages are propped up against the base of the paneling. Next to it, and about halfway across the painting, a fog-blue armillary sphere, also with nested rings but this time creating a grid, sits in a gold-colored stand. An eight-pointed star rises from the top of the sphere. Another blue rope droops between the paneling and a section of a wall, which spans the rightmost third of the landscape. The wall is made of horizontal wood boards, and an arched doorway is cut in the middle. The fourth and final panel is mostly filled with a wooden statue of a figurehead in the form of a woman wearing a long dress. She faces our left in profile. Her skin is ivory white on her face, chest, hands, and bare feet, and her dress is pale seafoam blue. She strides forward onto her right foot, farther from us, on a spray of carved scrolling swirls. The figurehead is propped up by a tree stump under that foot. The pointed bow of the ship is broken off behind her shoulders, so at first glance it resembles wings. A few smooth stones are scattered across the khaki-brown beach, especially around the armillary sphere. The water in the distance is represented as a band of light blue about a third of the way up the composition. Gray and oatmeal-brown clouds are streaked across the sky above. The painting is signed and dated in small white letters in the shadow cast by the figurehead: “de Kooning ’40.”
Willem de Kooning, Legend and Fact, 1940, duco enamel on gypsum board (marinite), Transferred from the Department of Commerce, Maritime Commission, 1971.52.1.a-d

Legend and Fact

Willem de Kooning · 1940 · duco enamel on gypsum board (marinite) ·  Accession ID  1971.52.1.a-d