de Kooning took night classes at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques, now the Willem de Kooning Academie, and in the midst of his education, at age 16, he landed his first job in the industry, working with the art director of a large department store.
College/University
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
Rue du Midi 144, 1000 Bruxelles, Belgium
De Kooning studied at the Académie royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.
Career
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
1943
Willem de Kooning (Photo by Henry Bowden)
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
1945
Willem de Kooning (Photo by Henry Bowden)
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
1945
Willem de Kooning (Photo by Henry Bowden)
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
1945
111 S Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60603, United States
Willem de Kooning at the exhibition "Modern Art in Advertising" sponsored by Container Corp. at Art Institute of Chicago. (Photo by Gordon Coster)
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
1950
Group portrait of American Abstract Expressionists, "The Irascibles." From left, rear: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne;(next row) Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jimmy Ernst (w. bow tie), Jackson Pollock (in striped jacket), James Brooks, Clyfford Still (leaning on knee), Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin; (in foreground) Theodoros Stamos (on bench), Barnett Newman (on stool), Mark Rothko (with glasses). (Photo by Nina Leen)
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
1953
East Hampton, New York, USA
Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) in East Hampton, New York State, August 1953. (Photo by Tony Vaccaro)
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
1953
East Hampton, New York, USA
Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) in East Hampton, New York State, August 1953. (Photo by Tony Vaccaro)
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
1959
New York, New York, USA
Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) (right) and American painter Franz Kline (1910 - 1962) stand together at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, New York, March 9, 1959. (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah)
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
1959
82 University Pl, New York, NY 10003, United States
Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) (left) and American sculptor John Chamberlain sit together in a book at the Cedar Tavern, New York, New York, September 15, 1959. (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah)
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
1959
New York, New York, USA
American abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell (1915 - 1991) (left) poses with Dutch American artist Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997), New York, New York, March 9, 1959. (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah)
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
1962
New York, New York, USA
Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) mixes paints in a metal bucket of the floor of his loft studio, New York, New York, March 23, 1962. (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah)
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
1962
827-831 Broadway, New York, New York, USA
Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) in his loft studio (at 827-831 Broadway), New York, New York, March 23, 1962. (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah)
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
1962
827-831 Broadway, New York, New York, USA
Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) as he works on a canvas in his loft studio (at 827-831 Broadway), New York, New York, March 23, 1962. (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah)
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
1967
Easthampton, Long Island, New York, USA
Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) looks at the camera as he mixes paint on a large workbench, painting a canvas in his studio in Easthampton, Long Island, New York. (Photo by Ben Van Meerondonk)
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
1967
New York, New York, USA
Willem de Kooning poses for a portrait in November 1967 in New York City, New York. (Photo by David Gahr)
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
1967
New York, New York, USA
Willem de Kooning poses for a portrait in November 1967 in New York City, New York. (Photo by David Gahr)
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
1967
New York, New York, USA
Willem de Kooning poses for a portrait in November 1967 in New York City, New York. (Photo by David Gahr)
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
1967
New York, New York, USA
Willem de Kooning poses for a portrait in November 1967 in New York City, New York. (Photo by David Gahr)
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
1967
New York, New York, USA
Willem de Kooning poses for a portrait in November 1967 in New York City, New York. (Photo by David Gahr)
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
1967
New York, New York, USA
Willem de Kooning poses for a portrait in November 1967 in New York City, New York. (Photo by David Gahr)
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
1967
Long Island, New York, USA
Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) mixes paints in his studio, surrounded by his abstract paintings, Long Island, New York, 1967. (Photo by Robert R. McElroy)
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
1975
1000 5th Ave, New York, NY 10028, United States
Francis Bacon & Willem DeKooning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art during the opening of Bacon's retrospective (Photo by Steve Schapiro)
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
1982
827-831 Broadway, New York, New York, USA
Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) as he sits at his desk in his loft studio (at 827-831 Broadway), New York, New York, March 23, 1962. (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah)
Gallery of Willem de Kooning
1985
East Hampton, New York, USA
Willem de Kooning, East Hampton, New York, 1985. (Photo by Chris Felver)
Group portrait of American Abstract Expressionists, "The Irascibles." From left, rear: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne;(next row) Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jimmy Ernst (w. bow tie), Jackson Pollock (in striped jacket), James Brooks, Clyfford Still (leaning on knee), Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin; (in foreground) Theodoros Stamos (on bench), Barnett Newman (on stool), Mark Rothko (with glasses). (Photo by Nina Leen)
Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) (right) and American painter Franz Kline (1910 - 1962) stand together at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, New York, March 9, 1959. (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah)
82 University Pl, New York, NY 10003, United States
Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) (left) and American sculptor John Chamberlain sit together in a book at the Cedar Tavern, New York, New York, September 15, 1959. (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah)
American abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell (1915 - 1991) (left) poses with Dutch American artist Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997), New York, New York, March 9, 1959. (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah)
Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) mixes paints in a metal bucket of the floor of his loft studio, New York, New York, March 23, 1962. (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah)
Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) as he works on a canvas in his loft studio (at 827-831 Broadway), New York, New York, March 23, 1962. (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah)
Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) looks at the camera as he mixes paint on a large workbench, painting a canvas in his studio in Easthampton, Long Island, New York. (Photo by Ben Van Meerondonk)
Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) mixes paints in his studio, surrounded by his abstract paintings, Long Island, New York, 1967. (Photo by Robert R. McElroy)
Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) as he sits at his desk in his loft studio (at 827-831 Broadway), New York, New York, March 23, 1962. (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah)
de Kooning took night classes at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques, now the Willem de Kooning Academie, and in the midst of his education, at age 16, he landed his first job in the industry, working with the art director of a large department store.
(Seated Woman was completed in 1951, during the same span ...)
Seated Woman was completed in 1951, during the same span of years as this significant series, highlighting its origins in a highly specific and formative period of the artist's career. Willem de Kooning, Seated Woman, 1951. Estimate $500,000-700,000 in Sotheby's Contemporary Art Day Auction.
1940
Standing Man
1942
Queen of Hearts
(Queen of Hearts is an important transitional work that bo...)
Queen of Hearts is an important transitional work that both evidences de Kooning’s rigorous training and heralds his signature Women of the late 1940s and ’50s.
1943
Seated Woman 2
1944
Still Life
1945
Fire Island
1946
Special Delivery
1946
Study for Backdrop
1946
Painting
(De Kooning used oil and enamel sign paint to make this bl...)
De Kooning used oil and enamel sign paint to make this black and white abstraction, which he created in the same year as he held his first solo exhibition. He began Painting by transferring segments of figurative drawings to the canvas, then applying layers of paint. He maintained that "even abstract shapes must have a likeness."
1948
Woman/Verso: Untitled
1948
Secretary
1948
Night
(The forms of Night are rich with suggestions. Some vaguel...)
The forms of Night are rich with suggestions. Some vaguely resemble human anatomy, while others recall architecture. These ambiguous shapes seem to float and jostle on the canvas. The night belongs to a series of abstract black-and-white paintings - inspired by de Kooning's late-night walks in New York - that express the spirit and texture of the modern metropolis.
1948
Untitled
1948
Asheville
(Willem de Kooning's Asheville takes its name from the Nor...)
Willem de Kooning's Asheville takes its name from the North Carolina town near Black Mountain College where de Kooning taught in the summer of 1948. A small but extremely complex work, it gathers together numerous, often oblique allusions, including references to the college and sections that recall de Kooning's early training in crafts such as marbling, woodgraining, and lettering.
1948
Untitled
1949
Untitled
1949
Two Figures in a Landscape
(Two figures in a landscape are one of many small painting...)
Two figures in a landscape are one of many small paintings made on paper that were informed by these drawings and which in turn relate to larger paintings on canvas or panel.
1950
Abstraction
(In the present Abstraction, painted in 1949-1950, De Koon...)
In the present Abstraction, painted in 1949-1950, De Kooning reveals a new conception of painting based on gesture and color - an accomplished style of his own that is far removed from any previous modern language.
1950
Woman
1950
painting
1950
painting
1950
Excavation
(Excavation, Willem de Kooning's largest painting up to 19...)
Excavation, Willem de Kooning's largest painting up to 1950, exemplifies the artist's innovative style of expressive brushwork and distinctive organization of space into loose, sliding planes with open contours.
1950
Woman I
(Woman I was one of a series of six paintings centered upo...)
Woman I was one of a series of six paintings centered upon a female figure that de Kooning worked on from 1950 to 1953.
1952
Woman and Bicycle
1952
Two Woman IV
1952
Woman V
(Woman V is the fifth in a series of six paintings depicti...)
Woman V is the fifth in a series of six paintings depicting three-quarter‑length female figures, either seated or standing, made between 1950 and 1953.
1953
Two Women in the Country
1954
Marilyn Monroe
1954
Composition
(Composition serves as a bridge between the Women and de K...)
Composition serves as a bridge between the Women and de Kooning’s next series of work, classified by critic Thomas Hess as the Abstract Urban Landscapes (1955-1958).
1955
Meg
1955
Gotham News
("Gotham" is the New York - equivalent setting of the Batm...)
"Gotham" is the New York - equivalent setting of the Batman comics, and "News" undoubtedly refers to the newsprint seen on the lower left and top center of the canvas.
1955
Saturday Night
(Executed in 1956, Willem de Kooning’s Saturday Night is a...)
Executed in 1956, Willem de Kooning’s Saturday Night is a canvas full of frenetic painterly activity. Befitting the title’s associations with a night out on the town, the painting’s brushstrokes and planes of colors articulate a simultaneously sensual and dissonant cacophony.
1956
Easter Monday
(The work appears to be in simultaneous processes of creat...)
The work appears to be in simultaneous processes of creation and destruction, a perpetual state of both realization and erasure that finds some analogy in the continuous growth and decay of nature.
1956
Park Rosenberg
1957
Unititled
1958
Suburb in Havana
1958
Untitled (verso: Untitled)
1959
Merritt Parkway
(Some of the "abstract landscapes" from 1957 to 1963 are b...)
Some of the "abstract landscapes" from 1957 to 1963 are based on the landscape around Long Island Sound, including Merritt Parkway, a local highway. Speed is suggested by the controlled thrusts of the brush while the naturalistic palette conveys the crisscross of the road through the landscape.
1959
Door to the River
(Door to the River bears neither the marks of continual re...)
Door to the River bears neither the marks of continual reworking characteristic of de Kooning’s earlier paintings nor the agitation and coloristic turbulence of his later work.
1960
Reclining Man (John F. Kennedy)
1963
Rosy Fingered Dawn at Louise Point
(The title Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point refers to one...)
The title Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point refers to one of Willem de Kooning’s favorite places in Long Island, New York.
1963
Clam Diggers
1963
Woman, Sag Harbour
(Woman, Sag Harbor was the first of the so-called door pai...)
Woman, Sag Harbor was the first of the so-called door paintings, which according to John McMahon, de Kooning’s studio assistant at the time, ensued when de Kooning began painting on doors discarded during the construction of the studio he was building for himself in Springs.
1964
Woman
1964
Untitled
1964
Two Figures
1964
Mae West
1964
Untitled
1964
Sphinx
1964
Woman
1964
Woman - Red Hair, Large Mouth, Large Foot
1965
Untitled
1965
Brooding Woman
1965
Pink Lady
1965
Woman
1965
Women Singing II
(Women Singing II - a painting inspired by pop singers tha...)
Women Singing II - a painting inspired by pop singers that Willem de Kooning saw on television - as the product of a shifting, mutable act of remembering and an iterative creative process involving drawn, traced and recycled imagery.
1966
Woman with a Green and Beige Background
1966
Untitled
1967
The Visit
(The central figure in The Visit is a woman with her legs ...)
The central figure in The Visit is a woman with her legs spread out. In the right-hand corner is a shape that could be either the woman's outstretched hand or a face in profile looking over her. The title was suggested by one of De Kooning's assistants, who thought that the composition resembled a medieval painting of the Annunciation.
1967
Untitled
1967
Untitled
1967
White Nude
1967
Untitled
1968
Figure at Gerard Beach
1970
Landscape at Stanton Street
1971
Untitled (woman)
1971
With Love
1971
Whose Name Was Writ in Water
(Whose Name Was Writ in Water takes nature as its theme. W...)
Whose Name Was Writ in Water takes nature as its theme. Water was a favorite subject of the artist, and he devised a rapid, slippery technique of broad impasto strokes with frayed edges, speckled with drips, to convey its fluidity and breaking movement.
1975
Two trees on Mary Street... Amen!
1975
Untitled XI
(Untitled XI belongs to this series, which was, with a few...)
Untitled XI belongs to this series, which was, with a few exceptions, untitled and chronologically numbered. Moving away from tightly organized compositions, de Kooning used free-flowing brushwork and softened, sensuous hues to liberate form.
1975
Devil at the Keyboard
1976
Untitled I
1981
Untitled V
1983
Untitled III
1983
Untitled XII
1983
Untitled
1986
Untitled #2, from Quatre Lithographies
1986
The Glazier
(The Glazier belongs to a series of paintings of men creat...)
The Glazier belongs to a series of paintings of men created in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The artist said that his palette of somber earth tones was inspired by the Boscoreale frescoes that he had often come to see at the Museum.
The Wave
(In The Wave, Willem de Kooning divided large areas of coo...)
In The Wave, Willem de Kooning divided large areas of cool marine colors with contoured lines to create shapes that suggest distorted figures. An elegant looping line like the automatic drawing of the surrealists suggests a figure reclining before a window or a door.
Willem de Kooning was the Dutch-born American painter and leader of the abstract expressionist school, whose paintings created a new vocabulary of abstract forms and a new pictorial space-shallow, compressed, and of great expressive force. De Kooning became known for his depiction of women, and women would dominate his paintings for decades. Later in life, de Kooning explored landscapes and even sculpture.
Background
Willem de Kooning was born on April 24, 1904, into a working-class family, in Rotterdam, Netherlands, to Leendert de Kooning and Cornelia Nobel. Willem de Kooning's parents divorced early in his childhood. De Kooning lived with his mother after the divorce but when she remarried she sent him back to live with his father. When his father remarried, de Kooning was sent back to his mother.
De Kooning's father, Leendert, had started divorce proceedings on February 20, 1906, less than two months before de Kooning's second birthday. At the time it was highly unusual for the husband rather than the wife to instigate a divorce. De Kooning's father cited ill-treatment and cruelty as the reasons for the divorce. De Kooning's mother, Cornelia, responded by filing her own divorce papers on April 21, 1906, citing adultery, ill-treatment, insults, and extravagance. Shortly thereafter she moved, taking Willem and his sister Marie with her, from the house on the Zaamolenstraat in North Rotterdam to a house on Josephstraat in West Rotterdam and then to a small two-story house at Ooievaarstraat 17 in North Rotterdam.
The divorce became final on January 7, 1907, and Leendert was ordered to pay five guilders a week in alimony/child support. In February the court granted custody of the two children to Cornelia, with co-guardianship assigned to Cornelia's father, Christiaan Gerardus Nobel. Cornelia and the children moved again - this time to a small home at Rietvankstraat 34 in North Rotterdam.
On April 8, 1908, Cornelia remarried (to Jacobus Lassooy). Five days before the marriage she sent Willem to live with his father. Willem's father remarried on November 25, 1908, to Neeltje Johanna Been. His father's new wife became pregnant one month into their marriage and de Kooning was sent back to live with his mother. On May 8, 1912, Cornelia and her new husband gave birth to a son - Willem de Kooning's half brother, Jacobus Johannes Lassooy ("Koos").
Willem de Kooning moved to the United States in 1926. Though he was part of the Artists Union and joined the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, he was forced to resign in 1937 when it was discovered that he was not a citizen. Luckily, he was given one of his first big breaks just a few years later when, in 1939, he painted part of a mural for the World’s Fair in New York. After nearly forty years in America, he finally became a United States citizen in 1962.
Education
School was mandatory for the first six years in the Netherlands after which time children would usually be apprenticed to a trade. De Kooning showed an early skill for drawing and embraced the artistic path at a young age, dropping out of school when he was 12 to begin an apprenticeship in commercial design and decorating. During this period, de Kooning took night classes at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques, now the Willem de Kooning Academie, and in the midst of his education, at age 16, he landed his first job in the industry, working with the art director of a large department store.
Afterward, he studied at the Académie royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and the Van Schelling School of Design in Antwerp.
With the help of his friend, Leo Cohan, de Kooning stowed away on a ship bound for the United States, where he jumped from various jobs in the Northeast until he eventually settled in New York City in 1926. In 1927 he moved to a studio in Manhattan and came under the influence of the artist, connoisseur, and art critic John Graham, the painter Arshile Gorky, and other important avant-garde artists. Gorky became one of de Kooning’s closest friends. While he worked for several years in commercial art and was not able to dedicate himself to his creative pursuits, de Kooning did find a like-minded group of artists in New York who encouraged him to paint for himself.
Around 1928, de Kooning began painting still life and figure compositions reflecting the school of Paris and Mexican influences. By the early 1930s, he was exploring abstraction, using biomorphic shapes and simple geometric compositions, clearly influenced by the likes of Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. As a young artist, he would have an unbeatable opportunity in 1935, when he became an artist for the federal art project for the WPA (Works Progress Administration), through which he created a number of murals and other works.
In 1936, de Kooning’s work was part of a Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) exhibit titled New Horizons in American Art, an early career highlight, but the following year his job with the WPA came to an abrupt end when he was forced to resign because he was not an American citizen. Soon after, de Kooning began a series of male figures, including Seated Figure (Classic Male) and Two Men Standing. Also during this period, de Kooning hired an apprentice, Elaine Fried, and she would sit as a female subject for such works as Seated Woman (1940). That would be the artist's first major painting of a woman, and he would go on to be chiefly known for his decades-long work in depicting women in his paintings.
Artistically, de Kooning kept on with his figure work while branching out into more abstract work as well, a notable example of which is The Wave. The abstract works began to reveal the presence of human forms within them, and his two artistic approaches merged in 1945’s Pink Angels, one of his first significant contributions to abstract expressionism. He would quickly become a central figure in the movement.
In 1948, de Kooning would have his first solo show, at the Charles Egan Gallery. Also during this period, he joined academia, briefly teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and at the Yale School of Art.
In the 1950s, de Kooning turned his abstract sights to landscape painting, and the series Abstract Urban Landscapes (1955-58), Abstract Parkway Landscapes (1957-61) and Abstract Pastoral Landscapes (1960-66) would help define an era in his artistic life.
About 1963, the year he moved permanently to East Hampton, Long Island, de Kooning returned to depicting women in such paintings as Pastorale and Clam Diggers. He reexplored the theme in the mid-1960s in paintings that were as controversial as his earlier women. In these works, which have been read as satiric attacks on the female anatomy, de Kooning painted with a flamboyant lubricity in keeping with the uninhibited subject matter.
In June 1968 Willem went to Rome on holiday and ran into an old friend Herzl Emanuel while staying with Emmanuel he excitedly began to produce a series of thirteen small clay sculptures in the style of his women series of paintings. After returning to the United States he commissioned David Christian to enlarge and cast them in bronze.
His later works, such as Whose Name Was Writ in Water and Untitled III, are lyrical, lush, and shimmering with light and reflections on the water. He turned more and more during his late years to the production of clay sculpture.
De Kooning was highly prolific during the 1980s, painting more than 300 canvases. During his later years, his health began to fail; by 1987 he began showing signs of dementia. In the 1980s de Kooning was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and a court declared him unfit to manage his estate, which was turned over to conservators. As the quality of his later work declined, his vintage works drew increasing profits. At Sotheby’s auctions, Pink Lady (1944) sold for $3.6 million in 1987 and Interchange (1955) brought $20.6 million in 1989.
There is much debate over the significance of his 1980s paintings, which became clean, sparse, and almost graphic while alluding to the biomorphic lines of his early works. Some have said that his very last works present a new direction of compositional complexity and color juxtaposition, and are prophetic of directions that some current painters continue to pursue. Some speculate that his mental condition and years of alcoholism had rendered him unable to carry out the mastery indicated in his early works. Others claim some of these paintings were removed from the studio and exhibited before de Kooning was finished with them. Unfortunately, de Kooning's last works have not been afforded the amount of critical commentary or substantial serious assessment that his earlier works received.
In 2018, a New York art dealer named David Killen revealed the discovery of what he believed to be were six de Kooning paintings from a New Jersey storage locker. Killen said he purchased the contents of the locker from the studio of an art conservator, and subsequently had the unsigned paintings evaluated by an expert. With an untitled work from the artist selling for more than $66 million in 2016, Killen noted that he was "ready for membership in the million-dollar club."
(Woman, Sag Harbor was the first of the so-called door pai...)
1964
Women Singing II
(Women Singing II - a painting inspired by pop singers tha...)
1966
Abstraction
(In the present Abstraction, painted in 1949-1950, De Koon...)
1950
Excavation
(Excavation, Willem de Kooning's largest painting up to 19...)
1950
Easter Monday
(The work appears to be in simultaneous processes of creat...)
1956
Seated Woman
(Seated Woman was completed in 1951, during the same span ...)
1940
Door to the River
(Door to the River bears neither the marks of continual re...)
1960
Two Figures in a Landscape
(Two figures in a landscape are one of many small painting...)
1950
Gotham News
("Gotham" is the New York - equivalent setting of the Batm...)
1955
Composition
(Composition serves as a bridge between the Women and de K...)
1955
Queen of Hearts
(Queen of Hearts is an important transitional work that bo...)
1943
Painting
(De Kooning used oil and enamel sign paint to make this bl...)
1948
Woman V
(Woman V is the fifth in a series of six paintings depicti...)
1953
Merritt Parkway
(Some of the "abstract landscapes" from 1957 to 1963 are b...)
1959
Asheville
(Willem de Kooning's Asheville takes its name from the Nor...)
1948
The Wave
(In The Wave, Willem de Kooning divided large areas of coo...)
Rosy Fingered Dawn at Louise Point
(The title Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point refers to one...)
1963
Woman I
(Woman I was one of a series of six paintings centered upo...)
1952
Untitled XI
(Untitled XI belongs to this series, which was, with a few...)
1975
Saturday Night
(Executed in 1956, Willem de Kooning’s Saturday Night is a...)
1956
The Glazier
(The Glazier belongs to a series of paintings of men creat...)
The Visit
(The central figure in The Visit is a woman with her legs ...)
1967
Whose Name Was Writ in Water
(Whose Name Was Writ in Water takes nature as its theme. W...)
1975
Night
(The forms of Night are rich with suggestions. Some vaguel...)
1948
Seated Woman 2
1944
Untitled
1967
Woman - Red Hair, Large Mouth, Large Foot
1965
Untitled V
1983
Woman
1964
Woman
1950
Untitled
1964
Woman and Bicycle
1952
Landscape at Stanton Street
1971
Two Women in the Country
1954
Untitled
1986
Two Figures
1964
Reclining Man (John F. Kennedy)
1963
Marilyn Monroe
1954
Untitled
1949
Mae West
1964
Untitled
1965
Untitled
1967
Meg
1955
Fire Island
1946
Untitled
1967
Woman/Verso: Untitled
1948
Untitled #2, from Quatre Lithographies
1986
Untitled I
1981
painting
1950
Seated figure (male classical)
1939
Woman
Special Delivery
1946
Figure at Gerard Beach
1970
Park Rosenberg
1957
Landscape of a Woman
Untitled (verso: Untitled)
1959
Untitled
1968
Untitled
1949
Untitled
1964
Woman with a Green and Beige Background
1966
Devil at the Keyboard
1976
Unititled
1958
Untitled (woman)
1971
Untitled III
1983
painting
1950
Two trees on Mary Street... Amen!
1975
Brooding Woman
1965
Still Life
1945
White Nude
1967
Pink Lady
1965
painting
Woman
1965
Suburb in Havana
1958
Standing Man
1942
Sphinx
1964
Secretary
1948
Clam Diggers
1963
Study for Backdrop
1946
Two Woman IV
1952
Untitled
1948
Woman
1964
With Love
1971
Untitled XII
1983
Religion
Hardly a religious man, de Kooning sometimes invoked God as a way of defining his own human condition. He used to say, "Only God doesn't have to believe in himself."
Views
While many of his colleagues moved from figuration to abstraction, de Kooning always painted figures, most notably women, and abstractions concurrently, making no distinction between the art historical categories. De Kooning's real subject, he insisted, was space and the figure-ground relation.
Unlike most of his colleagues, de Kooning never fully abandoned the depiction of the human figure. His paintings of women feature a unique blend of gestural abstraction and figuration. Heavily influenced by the Cubism of Picasso, de Kooning became a master at ambiguously blending figure and ground in his pictures while dismembering, re-assembling, and distorting his figures in the process.
Although known for continually reworking his canvases, de Kooning often left them with a sense of dynamic incompletion, as if the forms were still in the process of moving and settling and coming into a definition. In this sense, his paintings exemplify Harold Rosenberg's definition of Action Painting - the painting is an event, an encounter between the artist and the materials, rather than a finished work in the traditional sense.
Although he came to embody the popular image of the macho, hard-drinking artist, de Kooning approached his art with careful thought and was considered one of the most knowledgeable among the artists associated with the New York School. He possessed great facility, having been formally trained as a young man, and while he looked to the Modern masters like Picasso, Matisse, and Miró, he equally admired the likes of Ingres, Rubens, and Rembrandt.
Quotations:
"For really, when you think of all the life and death problems in the art of the Renaissance, who cares if a Chevalier is laughing or that a young girl has a red blouse on."
"There is a train track in the history of art that goes way back to Mesopotamia. It skips the whole Orient, The Mayas, And American Indians. Duchamp is on it. Cézanne is on it. Picasso and the Cubists are on it; Giacometti, Piet Mondrian, and so many... I have some feeling about all these people - millions of them - on this enormous track, a way into history. They had a peculiar way of measuring. They seemed to measure with a length similar to their own height... The idea that the thing that the artist is making can come to know for itself, how high it is, how wide and how deep it is, is a historical one, - a traditional one I think. It comes from man’s own image."
"I admit I know little of Orient art. But that is because I cannot find in it what I am looking for, or what I am talking about. To me the Oriental idea of beauty is that 'it isn’t there'. It is in a state of nor being there. It is absent. That is why it is so good. It is the same thing I don’t like in Suprematism, Purism, and non-objectivity... I do like the idea that they - the 'pots and pans' [pictured in the classic still life paintings], I mean - are always in relation to man. They have no soul of their own, like they seem to have in the Orient..."
"Nature then, is just nature. I admit I am very impressed with it. The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can do for is to put some order in ourselves. When a man ploughs his field at the right time, it means just that."
"Personally, I do not need a movement. What was given to me, I take for granted. Of all movements, I like Cubism most. It had that wonderful unsure atmosphere of reflection - a poetic frame where something could be possible, where an artist could practise his intuition. It didn’t want to get rid of what went before. Instead, it added something to it. The parts that I can appreciate in other [art] movements came out of Cubism. Cubism became a movement, it didn’t set out to be one. It has force in it, but it was no 'force-movement.' And then there is that one-man movement, Marcel Duchamp - for me a truly modern movement because it implies that each artist can do what he thinks he ought to - a movement for each person and open for everybody."
Membership
Willem de Kooning was a member of the Artists Union, the Federal Art Project, and Royal Academy of Visual Arts.
The Artists Union
,
United States
1934
The Federal Art Project
,
United States
1935 - 1937
Royal Academy of Visual Arts
Personality
In the early 1950s, on the advice of an acquaintance, Willem de Kooning began consuming and sometimes binging, alcohol to manage his anxiety and heart palpitations. His wife secretly administered to him a drug that made him sick when he drank. Elaine de Kooning returned to rescue him from the severe drinking problem which was causing blackouts and memory loss. In 1978 she persuaded him to seek help from Alcoholics' Anonymous.
In 1953, a then young Robert Rauschenberg asked De Kooning for one of his drawings so that he could "erase" it. De Kooning obliged and supplied him with a drawing, which Rauschenberg then methodically erased, and, along with fellow artist and friend Jasper Johns, meticulously matted and framed the work with the label, "Erased de Kooning Drawing."
His early paintings were in black and white because those colors were cheaper to buy. He refused to have his works exhibited next to those of Jackson Pollock in 1942 because he thought Jack the Dripper was too influenced, at that time, by surrealism.
Constantly dissatisfied with his work, he would scrape off a day’s work, the next day cover the canvas again, then scrape off that work, and repeat this endlessly. His scraping has been described as "muscular."
Physical Characteristics:
Late in his 60-year career, de Kooning began showing signs of dementia and in 1987 he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. This didn’t seem to slow his artistic output, though. In fact, he was more prolific than ever for several years. It seems unsurprising that the man who once said, “I don’t live to paint. I paint to live,” continued to produce artwork into his mid-80s.
Quotes from others about the person
"The artist's tool or the traditional artist's brush and maybe even oil paint are all disappearing very quickly. We use mostly commercial paint, and we generally tend toward larger brushes. In a way, Abstract expressionism started this all: De Kooning used house painter's brushes and house painters' techniques." - Frank Stella
"With him, his art always came first and people often came second. He loved to paint and he loved to be in love, and that can sometimes add up to a difficult temperament. Then, too, he serves as a great moral example to artists: he never rested on his successes; he kept changing. So many painters develop a blue-chip style and stay with it. De Kooning never relied on his virtuosity. He made it hard on himself to the end." - Mark Stevens
Interests
Artists
Rembrandt, Paul Cézanne, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Pablo Picasso
Connections
Willem de Kooning met his future wife Elaine Fried when she was 20 and him 34. After meeting, he began to instruct her in drawing and painting. An admirer of his work prior to the meeting, Elaine became his student, apprentice, muse, and - eventually - his wife. She sat for one of his early paintings of a female figure in Seated Woman (1940).
Married in 1943, de Kooning and Fried would have a fiery, alcohol-soaked life together before separating in the late 1950s for nearly 20 years. Their passionate union fell victim to professional ambition, poverty, alcohol abuse and infidelities. In the mid-1970s, they would reunite and remain together until her 1989 death. Elaine and Willem de Kooning had an open marriage.
Willem had a daughter, Lisa de Kooning, in 1956, as a result of his affair with Joan Ward. After his wife died in 1989, de Kooning’s daughter cared for him until his death in 1997, at age 92.