Among the 200-odd works in the Museum of Modern Art's staggering Willem de Kooning retrospective is his 1947 painting Carole Lombard (the snapshot above, taken last year at the Cincinnati Art Museum, is the only image of it I could find online). Lombard, who died in 1942, seems to be embodied in a spectral smile in the upper right.
Information about this peculiar yet touching tribute is hard to find. The show's mammoth catalog says nothing about it, and De Kooning: An American Master, the 700-page biography by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, doesn't mention it. Google turns up nothing. Stevens and Swan do say, however, that de Kooning "loved American movies."
At the bottom right of the painting is a dedication: "To Nini with love from Bill." According to Stevens and Swan, Virginia "Nini" Diaz was a circus performer de Kooning dated from the late 1920s to mid-'30s. They lived together while he engaged in various affairs, and she had several abortions. He met Elaine Fried, who would become his wife, in 1938.
In their discussion of de Kooning's game-changing 1950 abstraction Excavation, Stevens and Swan note that, as he was finishing it, he "painted a small rectangle near the bottom of the painting. He described it as a 'door,' a way to leave." In the painting, the door appears to be open. There's a door painted near the bottom of Carole Lombard, too, and it's closed.
