Willem de Kooning

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(b Rotterdam, 24 April 1904; d East Hampton, NY, 19 March 1997). Painter and sculptor of Dutch birth. He was a leading figure of ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM whose painterly gesturalism transcended the conventional definitions of figuration and abstraction and substantially influenced art after World War II.

Part of the De Kooning family

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The Dutch-born American painter Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) was a leader of the abstract expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s.

Before the 1940s the major advances in modern painting were forged on English and European soil. American artists, although aware of these advances, had not generally participated in their origin. After World War II, however, the United States, and in particular New York City, became a focal point for modernist developments. The most celebrated of these is known as abstract expressionism - abstract, because most of the new art eschewed all traces of visible reality; expressionism, because it appeared to have been created through uncontrolled and sometimes violent painterly gestures. Known also as action painting or painterly abstraction (historians have yet to agree on the most appropriate designation), abstract expressionism reached international scope and influence during the 1950s.

Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock are the best-known exponents of this new American style. Although their works inspired public ridicule at first, both artists are now recognized as major figures within the broader tradition of art history. For de Kooning this recognition is especially significant, because he always viewed himself as a link in the great tradition of painterly art that runs from the Renaissance to the present day.

Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam, Holland, on April 24, 1904. In 1916 he left school to work as a commercial artist, and he enrolled in evening classes at the Academy of Fine Arts in his native city, where he studied for eight years. During this period he became aware of the group called de Stijl, whose membership included Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, two of the most influential abstractionists of the early twentieth century.

Early Career

In 1926 de Kooning immigrated to the United States. He took a studio in New York City and supported himself by doing commercial art and house painting. In his own painting he began to experiment with abstraction but, like many artists during the Depression, was unable to devote full time to his work. The opportunity to do so came in 1935, when he worked for a year on the Federal Art Project of the Works Project Administration.

In the 1940s de Kooning's career as a painter began to accelerate. He participated in several group shows and in 1946 had his first one-man exhibition in New York City. Among sophisticated patrons and dealers this show established de Kooning as a major figure in contemporary American painting. In the same year he married Elaine Fried, and two years later he taught at the experimental Black Mountain College, which was then under the direction of the influential color abstractionist Josef Albers.

De Kooning's paintings from the 1930s and 1940s reveal many of the same stylistic vacillations that characterize his better-known productions of the period after 1950. In the early work de Kooning approached the problems of abstraction cautiously. Bill-Lee's Delight (1946), for instance, is ostensibly devoid of subject matter from the visible world. Rough-hewn masses sweep toward the center of the composition, where they collide, overlap, and twist into painterly space. Many of the planes, however, particularly those on the periphery of the painting, appear to be remnants of the human body; their undulating contours loosely recall arms, legs, and torsos that have been distilled into pictorial entities. In other words, the painting retains figurative allusions in spite of its apparent abstractness.

Retaining the Human Image

Bill-Lee's Delight indirectly reveals de Kooning's deep commitment to the image of the human body. Even earlier works show the character of this commitment more explicitly. Queen of Hearts (1943-1946) presents the three-quarter image of a seated woman whose head, breasts, and arms are drawn with loosely flowing contours. The figure is freely distorted and somewhat unsettling: the head is twisted, the facial anatomy is askew, and the limbs and breasts appear ready to twist off and float into space. In overall style the painting recalls European surrealism with its eerie interpretations of figurative content. It is also similar to the abstract, quasi-surrealist style of Arshile Gorky, with whom de Kooning had once shared a studio.

Some of de Kooning's finest paintings were executed in the period that ended in 1950; these include Ashville (1949) and Excavation (1950). Both works retain some figurative allusions, but they achieve a powerful, abstract flatness, thereby insisting upon their identity as paintings. Moreover, both canvases achieve this identity within a relatively restricted color range; this lends tautness to the compelling presence of each painting.

De Kooning since 1950

In spite of the achievement marked by paintings like Ashville and Excavation, de Kooning was evidently uncomfortable with the problems of abstraction. In 1950 he returned to the human figure, embarking upon his famous "Woman" series. Woman I (1950-1952) is probably the most famous of the series. The figure is executed in a tortured, aggressive manner and emerges like some demonic presence. Paint itself is likewise assaulted - dragged, pushed, and scraped - with a technique that, for many viewers, is the ultimate of abstract expressionist style. When the "Woman" paintings were shown in 1953 in New York City, they catapulted de Kooning to fame and notoriety. Although he was honored with numerous awards and retrospective exhibitions after that, his work periodically revealed doubts and uncertainties about its direction.

During the late 1950s de Kooning again abandoned the human figure in favor of abstraction. The paintings from these years are sometimes called "landscapes" because their open, expansive space is suggestive of the space of the natural environment. In Suburb in Havana (1958), for instance, broad, earth-colored diagonals reach into space and extend toward a blue mass that resembles both sky and water. Because of the explosiveness with which they open pictorial space, these landscapes count among de Kooning's most spontaneous and exhilarating achievements.

From the early 1960s de Kooning's development seemed problematic and uncertain. Once again he returned to the human figure and a second "Woman" series. These works display the master's characteristic blend of technical gusto and emotional fervor, but they evoked mixed opinions among his critics. Perhaps more historical perspective is needed before these paintings can be viewed objectively.

De Kooning's first retrospective took place in 1953 in Boston. In 1954 he enjoyed a second, at the Venice Biennale. The largest retrospective was held in New York City in 1969. He was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1960, and he received the Freedom Award Medal in 1964.

Since the 1960s de Kooning continued to be one of the most powerful representatives of abstract art. The period from 1981 to 1989 was one of the most fertile of his life, giving rise to over 300 works. Sadly, this burst of creativity proved to be his last. Alzheimer's Disease, diagnosed in 1990, prevented further work for the remaining seven years of his life. De Kooning died on March 19, 1997, at his home in East Hampton, New York.

Further Reading

Several monographs on de Kooning have been written, among them, Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning (1959), and Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh, De Kooning (1960). Also important is Hess's Willem de Kooning (1969), the catalog for the Museum of Modern Art's de Kooning retrospective of 1969. For a more general picture of de Kooning's relation to postwar American art see Barbara Rose, American Art since 1900 (1967). For more information, please see Harry F. Gaugh, De Kooning (Abbeville Press, 1983); Paul Cummings, Willem De Kooning: Drawings, Paintings, Sculpture (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1983); and Diane Waldman, De Kooning (Abrams, 1987).

(1904- ), painter. Considered by many art historians a chef d'école of the moment in American art history called abstract expressionism, de Kooning himself would never concede that he belonged to any movement or school. Like other painters whose stylistic evolution occurred during the Great Depression when a lively debate ensued among artists working in the Federal Art Project under the wpa, de Kooning abjured received ideas about painting. Throughout his career, he challenged even his own assumptions.

When he arrived in the United States as an illegal immigrant in 1926, de Kooning had already had eight years of conventional training at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques and had made intelligent appraisals of the great modernists, including his countryman Piet Mondrian. He carried with him a culture that informed his painting no matter how vigorously he challenged himself and his colleagues. Both de Kooning and his closest ally in the new movement germinating in New York--the Armenian-born Arshile Gorky--fed their painting impulse with insights gained equally from the old masters and from modern painters such as Matisse, Picasso, Mondrian, and Miró. Gorky's example (he unabashedly rehearsed several styles gleaned from Picasso and Miró before he evolved his own) was important to de Kooning, who slowly moved from tentative explorations of cubist and surrealist modes to a singular, free style.

His first one-man exhibition in 1948 was an event of considerable moment: he showed an audacious group of black and white abstractions rendered with enamel house paints in which tightly organized spaces were articulated in sweeping strokes. Shortly after, in such monumental works as the six-by-eight-foot Excavation (1950; Chicago Art Institute), de Kooning established an autographic idiom that was identifiably abstract--that is, whispers of organic forms were sublimated--and expressionist in its freely brushed, sweepingly animated technique. Along with Jackson Pollock, with whom he had been friendly since the early 1940s, de Kooning was regarded as a pioneer of a new painterly idiom for which the terms gestural and informal were often invoked. In 1953, de Kooning surprised his appreciative public with an exhibition of heavily brushed, bluntly frontal images grouped under the title Woman, in which what had earlier been only cryptic allusions to human shapes became explicit. These shocking images, which de Kooning himself compared to the Venus of Willendorf, were proof of his extraordinary freedom from all strictures.

Thereafter, his spirited brush moved to capture ideas of figures, landscapes, and what he called the "Byzantine" image of urban New York, offering scores of younger artists a model of technical and moral freedom. Known first as a painter's painter, de Kooning is now recognized throughout the world as the old master of abstract expressionism.

Bibliography:

Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning (1959); Harold Rosenberg, Willem de Kooning (1974).

Author:

Dore Ashton

See also Abstract Expressionism; Painting and Sculpture.

A Dutch-born twentieth-century American artist who was a leader of abstract expressionism. His monumental, highly colored, often violent works include Woman, a series of paintings done in the early 1950s.

Quotes:

"My interest in desperation lies only in that sometimes I find myself having become desperate. Very seldom do I start out that way. I can see of course that, in the abstract, thinking and all activity is rather desperate."

"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 hope for is to put some order into ourselves."

"An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will."

"In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble."

"Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists."

"Style is a fraud. I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns."

See more famous quotes by Willem De Kooning

Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning, Woman V (1952-53), National Gallery of Australia
Born	April 24, 1904(1904-04-24) Rotterdam, Netherlands
Died	March 19, 1997 (aged 92) Long Island, New York United States
Nationality	Dutch, American
Field	Abstract expressionism
Works	Woman I, Easter Monday, Attic, Excavation

Willem de Kooning (April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was an abstract expressionist artist, born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

In the post-World War II era, de Kooning painted in a style that came to be referred to variously as Abstract expressionism, Action painting, and the New York School. Other painters that developed this school of painting include Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston and Clyfford Still among others.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Mature works 3 See also 4 Notes 5 References 6 External links

Biography

De Kooning's parents, Leendert de Kooning and Cornelia Nobel, were divorced when he was about five years old, and he was raised by his mother and a stepfather.^[1] His early artistic training included eight years at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques.^[2] In the 1920s he worked as an assistant to the art director of a Rotterdam department store.^[3]

In 1926, De Kooning entered the United States as a stowaway on a British freighter, the SS Shelly, to Newport News, Virginia. He then went by ship to Boston, and took a train from Boston to Rhode Island, and eventually settled in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he supported himself as a house painter until moving to a studio in Manhattan in 1927. In 1929 he met the artist and critic John D. Graham, who would become an important stimulus and supporter.^[4] He also met the painter Arshile Gorky, who became one of De Kooning's closest and most influential friends.

In October 1935, De Kooning began to work on the WPA (Works Progress Administration) Federal Art Project, and he won the Logan Medal of the arts. He was employed by this work-relief program until July 1937, when he resigned because of his alien status. This period of about two years provided the artist, who had been supporting himself during the early Depression by commercial jobs, with his first opportunity to devote full time to creative work. He worked on both the easel-painting and mural divisions of the project (the several murals he designed were never executed).

In 1938, probably under the influence of Gorky, De Kooning embarked on a series of male figures, including Two Men Standing, Man, and Seated Figure (Classic Male), while simultaneously embarking on a more purist series of lyrically colored abstractions, such as Pink Landscape and Elegy. As his work progressed, the heightened colors and elegant lines of the abstractions began to creep into the more figurative works, and the coincidence of figures and abstractions continued well into the 1940s. This period includes the representational but somewhat geometricized Woman and Standing Man, along with numerous untitled abstractions whose biomorphic forms increasingly suggest the presence of figures. By about 1945 the two tendencies seemed to fuse perfectly in Pink Angels.

In 1938, De Kooning met Elaine Marie Fried, later known as Elaine de Kooning, whom he married in 1943. She also became a significant artist. During the 1940s and thereafter, he became increasingly identified with the Abstract Expressionist movement and was recognized as one of its leaders in the mid-1950s. In 1948, De Kooning had his first one-man show, which consisted of his black-and-white enamel compositions, at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York. He taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1948 and at the Yale School of Art in 1950/51.

Mature works

“	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 hope for is to put some order into ourselves.	”
	— Willem de Kooning [5]

In 1946, too poor to buy artists' pigments, he turned to black and white household enamels to paint a series of large abstractions; of these works, Light in August (c. 1946) and Black Friday (1948) are essentially black with white elements, whereas Zurich (1947) and Mailbox (1947/48) are white with black. Developing out of these works in the period after his first show were complex, agitated abstractions such as Asheville (1948/49), Attic (1949), and Excavation (1950; Art Institute of Chicago), which reintroduced color and seem to sum up with taut decisiveness the problems of free-associative composition he had struggled with for many years.

The hallmark of de Kooning's style was an emphasis on complex figure ground ambiguity. Background figures would overlap other figures causing them to appear in the foreground, which in turn might be overlapped by dripping lines of paint thus positioning the area into the background.

De Kooning had painted women regularly in the early 1940s and again from 1947 to 1949. The biomorphic shapes of his early abstractions were derived from objects found in the studio. But it was not until 1950 that he began to explore the subject of women exclusively. In the summer of that year he began Woman I (located at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City), which went through innumerable metamorphoses before it was finished in 1952.

Woman III, (1953), private collection

During this period he also created other paintings of women. These works were shown at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1953 and caused a sensation, chiefly because they were figurative when most of his fellow Abstract Expressionists were painting abstractly and because of their blatant technique and imagery. The appearance of aggressive brushwork and the use of high-key colors combine to reveal a woman all too congruent with some of modern man's most widely held sexual fears. The toothy snarls, overripe, pendulous breasts, vacuous eyes, and blasted extremities imaged the darkest Freudian insights. Some of these paintings also seemed to hearken back to early Mesopotamian / Akkadian works, with the large, almost "all-seeing" eyes.

The Woman paintings II through VI (1952-53) are all variants on this theme, as are Woman and Bicycle (1953; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) and Two Women in the Country (1954). The deliberate vulgarity of these paintings contrasts with the French painter Jean Dubuffet's no less harsh Corps de Dame series of 1950, in which the female, formed with a rich topography of earth colours, relates more directly to universal symbols.

From the late 1950s to the early 1960s, De Kooning entered a new phase of nearly pure abstractions more related to landscape than to the human figure. These paintings, such as Bolton Landing (1957) and Door to the River (1960) bear broad brushstrokes and calligraphic tendencies similar to works of his contemporary Franz Kline.

In 1963, De Kooning moved permanently to East Hampton, Long Island, ^[6]and returned to depicting women while also referencing the landscape in such paintings as Woman, Sag harbor and Clam Diggers. He also turned to sculpture in later years, creating a number of works that were later cast in bronze.

De Kooning as sculptor: Seated Woman on a Bench, bronze of 1972 (cast 1976), in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

On September 14, 1964, De Kooning was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson.

Willem de Kooning was diagnosed with, in all probability , Alzheimer's disease.^[3] After his wife, Elaine, died on February 1, 1989, his daughter, Lisa, and his lawyer, John Eastman were granted guardianship over De Kooning.^[3] As the style of his later works continued to evolve into early 1989, his vintage works drew increasing profits; at Sotheby's auctions Pink Lady (1944) sold for US$3.6 million in 1987 and Interchange (1955) brought $20.6 million in 1989.

There is much debate over the relevance and significance of his 1980s paintings, many of 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 daring color juxtapositions. Some speculate that his mental condition and previous life of alcoholism had rendered him unable to carry out the mastery indicated in his early works, while others see these late works as boldly prophetic of directions that some current painters continue to pursue. Unfortunately, gossip has tainted the scant critical commentary afforded these last works, which have yet to be seriously assessed.

See also

• Abstract expressionism
• Action painting
• Elaine de Kooning
• Impasto
• Women in art
• Woman III

Notes

1. ^ Willem de Kooning, Britannica.com, p1
2. ^ Marcia Brennan, Modernism's Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction, MIT Press, p71. ISBN 026202571X
3. ^ ^{a b c} Barbara Hess, Willem de Kooning 1904-1997: Content as a Glimpse, Taschen, 2004, p87. ISBN 3822821357
4. ^ Barbara Hess, Willem de Kooning 1904-1997: Content as a Glimpse, Taschen, p15. ISBN 3822821357
5. ^ Abstract Expressionism, by Barbara Hess, Taschen, 2005, pg 15
6. ^ Willem de Kooning at Encyclopædia Britannica

References

• Marika Herskovic, American Abstract and Figurative Expressionism Style Is Timely Art Is Timeless An Illustrated Survey With Artists' Statements, Artwork and Biographies. (New York School Press, 2009.) ISBN 9780967799421. p. 76-79; p. 127; p. 136
• Marika Herskovic, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s: An Illustrated Survey, (New York School Press, 2003.) ISBN 0-9677994-1-4. p. 94-97
• Marika Herskovic, New York School Abstract Expressionists: Artists Choice by Artists, (New York School Press, 2000.) ISBN 0-9677994-0-6. p. 16; p. 36; p. 106-109
• Edvard Lieber, Willem de Kooning: Reflections in the Studio, 2000, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. ISBN 0-8109-4560-6
• ART USA NOW Ed. by Lee Nordness;Vol.1, (The Viking Press, Inc., 1963.) pp. 134-137
• The American Presidency Project

External links

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• Works by Willem de Kooning at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

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