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"Luminous Art & Design :: Art & Artists"
Willem de Kooning :: Biography and Books"
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Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) was a Dutch-born American painter of abstract expressionism who helped establish New York as an artistic center. His work is known for the aggressive images in raw colors slashes on the canvas, as the series ‘Woman’.
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Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) was a Dutch-born American painter of abstract expressionism. He and other members of the New York School helped to establish New York as a center for artistic activity. De Kooning is remembered as an original and startling artist who created large canvases with a mixture of abstract and figurative images.
Willem de Kooning was born on 24 April 1904 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His talent was already evident in his childhood and at the age of 12 he was apprenticed to a firm of commercial artists and decorators. For eight years, he took evening classes at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques. He also studies at other academies in Brussels and Antwerp. In 1926, de Kooning emigrated to the United States, where he supported himself as a commercial artist, window dresser and house painter during the Great Depression. The opportunity to work full-time to his work came in 1935, when started to work on the Federal Art Project. He shared a studio with Arshile Gorky and his early pictures were influenced by Gorky's Surrealist style.
De Kooning’s participated in several exhibitions in the 1940s and had his first solo exhibition in 1948 at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York. He showed 10 abstract paintings, which were mainly in black-and-white enamel house paints. At that time he was too poor to buy artists’ pigments and had to turn to this cheaper solution. The exhibition was a critical success and included his finest paintings ‘Attic’ (1949) and ‘Excavation’ (1950).
In 1953, Willem de Kooning showed his best-known works in a provocative series titled ‘Woman’ at the Sidney Janis Gallery. The six large oil paintings and several pastel sketches showed vulgar images of women. The raw colors were applied in slashing strokes, and dragged, pushed and scraped on the canvases in an aggressive manner. At first the exhibition caused a scandal, but ultimately pushed de Kooning to fame and notoriety.
In the late 1950s, de Kooning abandoned the human figure and painted a number of fairly abstract landscapes with images of urban New York, including ‘Gotham News’ (1955-56) and ‘Backyard on 10th Street’ (1956). In the mid-1960s, he returned to the subject of women, this time placing the female figure in abstract landscapes: ‘Clam Diggers’ (1964) and ‘Singing Woman’ (1965).
In the 1980s, the artist started to suffer from short-term memory loss associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Fortunately, this did not affect his ability to paint and during this decade he produced hundreds of large canvases. His work took on a simpler form of sinuously intertwining ribbons in paired colors. These late works were in the style of the clean, surface-oriented painters of the 1990s and 21st century. He finally stopped painting in mid-1990. Willem de Kooning died on March 19, 1997, at his home in East Hampton, New York.
Willem de Kooning’s work appears to be created spontaneously, uncontrolled and with aggressive gestures. However, he often spent many months on a single piece. His works are considered masterpieces of the abstract expressionist movement and continue to inspire generations of painters.
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