Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His father was a liquor distributor and his mother - reputedly a woman of fearsome toughness - ran a sailor's bar on the waterfront. He left school at the age of 12 to work as an apprentice in a painting and decorating firm. He came to America as an illegal alien in 1926, two years after graduating from the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts where he had been influenced by De Stijl and Flemish Expressionists. His main interests as a youth were in commercial art, shop-window design and illustration. Working his way over on a steamer and jumping ship in New York without papers, he settled in the US as an illegal immigrant, working first in New Jersey as a house painter and later in 1935-36 on the WPA art project. He executed a mural for the New York World's Fair in 1939. Gradually he made friends with artists and joined the Abstract Expressionists in NYC, becoming a leading member. His painting had its roots in his mentor Arshile Gorky's Surrealism, though he often used open allusions to reality, which may have been his starting-point in a painting or may accidentally have occurred during the painting's execution. De Kooning had his first one-man show in NYC at the age of forty-four in 1948. His best-known series, the Women (1952), was the first sign of the 'new figuration' in NY painting. Its violent imagery and technique caused a sensation. It was followed by a series of landscapes and a return in about 1963 to the theme of the woman, painted this time in a flamboyant, almost satiric style. During the 1950's and early 1960's, de Kooning was by far the most imitated of the Abstract Expressionists. He taught at the Yale School of Fine Arts in 1952-53, and was known as one of the "action painters" that saw the significance of painting in the physical activity which brought it about. In the late '50's he moved from NYC to Long Island, focusing more on landscape and a brief attempt at sculpture. In the 1970's, he produced some large and congested landscapes, and tributes to Gorky in the 1980's that greatly resemble the Armenian's own works. Suffering from alcoholism and Alzheimer's in his latter years, de Kooning's final paintings seem nothing more than the remains of his style.Source: The Poindexter Collection of Modern Abstract Expressionism(Guggenheim Museum notes)b. 1904, Rotterdam; d. 1997, Long Island, N.Y. Willem de Kooning was born April 24, 1904, in Rotterdam. From 1916 to 1925, he studied at night at the Academie van Beeldende Kunsten en Technische Wetenschappen, Rotterdam, while apprenticed to a commercial-art and decorating firm and later working for an art director. In 1924, he visited museums in Belgium and studied further in Brussels and Antwerp. De Kooning came to the United States in 1926 and settled briefly in Hoboken, New Jersey. He worked as a house painter before moving to New York in 1927, where he met Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, and John Graham. He took various commercial-art and odd jobs until 1935–36, when he was employed in the mural and easel divisions of the WPA Federal Art Project. Thereafter he painted full-time. In the late 1930s, his abstract as well as figurative work was primarily influenced by the Cubism [more] and Surrealism [more] of Pablo Picasso and also by Gorky, with whom he shared a studio. In 1938, de Kooning started his first series of Women, which would become a major recurrent theme. During the 1940s, he participated in group shows with other artists who would form the New York School and become known as Abstract Expressionists. De Kooning’s first solo show, which took place at the Egan Gallery, New York, in 1948, established his reputation as a major artist; it included a number of the allover black-and-white abstractions he had initiated in 1946. The Women of the early 1950s were followed by abstract urban landscapes, Parkways, rural landscapes, and, in the 1960s, a new group of Women. In 1968, de Kooning visited the Netherlands for the first time since 1926, for the opening of his retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. In Rome in 1969, he executed his first sculptures—figures modeled in clay and later cast in bronze—and in 1970–71 he began a series of life-size figures. In 1974, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, organized a show of de Kooning’s drawings and sculpture that traveled throughout the United States, and in 1978 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, mounted an exhibition of his recent work. In 1979, de Kooning and Eduardo Chillida received the Andrew W. Mellon Prize, which was accompanied by an exhibition at the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh. De Kooning settled in the Springs, East Hampton, Long Island, in 1963. He was honored with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1997. The artist died March 19, 1997, on Long Island.