By Paul Tucker and Wendy Baring-Gould

Willem de Kooning's "Reclining Figure" is a monumental bronze sculpture by one of the 20th century's most important artists. Born in 1904 in Rotterdam, Holland, where his mother worked as a bartender in a tough waterfront tavern, de Kooning studied in local schools and attended the Rotterdam Academy of Art. In 1926, at age 22, he immigrated to the United States to pursue his career as an artist, working initially for $9.00 an hour as a housepainter in Hoboken, New Jersey, and then settled in New York the following year. He continued to paint, working odd jobs to support himself, including a stint with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), where he earned the standard $23.86 a week.

In his West 42nd Street studio, he devoted himself exclusively to working and reworking figurative and abstract images, which were depicted with loose lines or layers of gestural brush strokes. Impassioned by the physical act of making art and the immediacy of the resulting forms, he never believed a work was finished. "There is no plot in painting," he once declared. "It is an occurrence by which I discover [content]."

He sold few paintings, however, and didn't have a solo exhibition until 1948, which received one positive review, written by former UMass Boston art historian Renee Arb. After nearly two decades of struggle, this show proved to be a turning point in his career. Soon thereafter, de Kooning emerged, with Jackson Pollock, as a leader of the group that became known as the Abstract Expressionists.

"Reclining Figure" was among the first sculptures he ever made. Conceived and executed in 1969 as a small, hand-size model, "Reclining Figure" was one of only three works that de Kooning enlarged and cast in his lifetime. Its mate, "Standing Figure," is displayed in front of the West wing of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

"Reclining Figure" weighs 4,000 pounds and is on loan to the university from the de Kooning estate. Like many of de Kooning's paintings, the piece vacillates between abstraction and figuration. From one point of view, it appears to be a tangle of lines and shapes, from another, a contorted figure, from yet another a lumbering, prehistoric beast. It sometimes seems to be more than one person or an animal and a human. With its multiple personae, "Reclining Figure" evokes comparisons with sculptures by modern masters, such as Rodin and Matisse, as well as with classical art, such as the famous "Dying Gaul" of the third century B.C.

The piece is located on the Plaza level behind the Quinn Administration Building.

Image: "Reclining Figure," sculpted by Willem de Kooning, stands 5'7 inches tall. The piece includes shapes and imprints originally made by de Kooning's hands as he molded the original small figure in clay. The piece is located behind the Quinn Administration Building. (Photo by Harry Brett)