Willem de Kooning

American, 1904–1997

BiographyBorn in Rotterdam in 1902, Willem de Kooning studied at the city's Academie van Beelende Kunsten from 1916 to 1924, while working for a commercial art firm. He emigrated to the United States in 1926 and moved the following year to New York, where he earned a living as a sign-painter. By the 1930s he was involved with the New York avant-garde, and was particularly close to John Graham (1881-1961) and Arshile Gorky. Until the early 1940s de Kooning's work drew from the sources, including the work of Graham, Miró, and Picasso, that were of interest to so many younger painters in New York. He worked on various mural projects for the WPA in 1935-36. In 1938 he met the painter Elaine Fried, his future wife, and began his first series of Women. During the late 1930s and early ‘40s, de Kooning's painting became progressively vigorous, even violent in palette and execution. The figure underwent increasing fragmentation into irregular, planar shapes. The artist's resistance to terminating work on a canvas--the most famous example of which would be Woman I of 1950-52 (New York, The Museum of Modern Art)--was already an important aspect of his practice.

By the mid 1940s de Kooning's characteristic forms and complex interweaving of drawing and color, figure and ground, and plane and surface took shape in both figural works and abstractions. Between 1945 and 1950 he executed a series of Black and White Abstractions, which included the painter's largest canvas up to that time. Despite the formal and procedural equivalence of de Kooning's figural and abstract painting throughout this period, the series of Woman paintings from 1950-55, first shown at Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, in 1953, were initially greeted in the art press as a momentous reversion to figuration; for many, they were also shocking portrayals of the female body. The gendered character of de Kooning’s Woman paintings of the 50s continues to be an important subject of art-historical inquiry. From the mid 1950s to the early 60s de Kooning produced many remarkable abstractions, which he called landscapes, and whose virtuosic execution, assured touch, and justness of pictorial relationships may still be unmatched in American abstract painting. Throughout the 1960s and 70s the themes of woman and landscape continually intersected in de Kooning's painting, while his palette and brushwork progressively softened. The artist continued to work into the 1980s (although suffering from Alzheimer's disease from around 1981); he produced a large number of sculptures between 1969 and 1974, and a group of luminous abstract paintings in the 1980s. He died in New York on 19 March 1997.