Willem de Kooning
 Willem
de Kooning is widely considered to be one of the greatest
Abstract
Expressionist painters of the post-World War II period, his
dominance rivaled perhaps only by Jackson
Pollock. Remembered for his large canvases as well as the
controversial melding of both abstract and figurative imagery, de
Kooning lived much longer than his contemporaries, many of whom had
untimely deaths. The group of painters that would be identified as
the New York School was made up of de Kooning and contemporaries
such as Arshile Gorky and Edgar Denby, and they helped to establish
New York City’s reputation as a center for artistic activity.
Although his work appears spontaneous, de Kooning often spent many
months on a single piece, repeatedly painting over completed
sections and occasionally pressing newspaper onto the drying canvas.
Friend and New Yorker critic Harold Rosenberg first used the term
“Action painting” to refer to de Kooning’s violent slashes of color
and the shifting foreground and background typical of his abstract
work. “Painting isn’t just the visual thing that reaches your
retina,” the artist once said, “it’s what’s behind it. I’m not
interested in ‘abstracting’ or taking things out or reducing
painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because
I can keep putting more and more things in -- drama, anger, pain,
love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it
again becomes an emotion or an idea. It doesn’t matter if it’s
different from mine as long as it comes from the painting which has
its own integrity and intensity.” Willem de Kooning was born on April 24, 1904, in Rotterdam, Holland.His father was a liquor dispenser and his mother ran a sailor's bar on the waterfront. 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. His early artistic training included eight years at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques. In the 1920s he worked as an assistant to the art director of a Rotterdam department store. |
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 In
1926 Willem de Kooning headed to America as a stowaway and settled in
New York. He worked as a house-painter, sign writer and carpenter.
Willem de Kooning met other artists, including John Graham,
Stuart Davis and Arshile Gorky and
worked for the Federal Art Project, for which he did murals between 1935
and 1939. From 1935 in fact, he was able to devote himself entirely to
painting. He shared a studio with Gorky and his early pictures were
influenced by Gorky's Surrealist style and by
Picasso's painting. However, de Kooning was also inspired by the
Gestural branch of the New York School as well as Jackson Pollock and
Franz Kline. In 1939 Willem de Kooning was commissioned by the New York
World’s Fair to create a mural for the Hall of Pharmacy that he entitled
Medicine. During this period, he also painted a series of portraits of
men that included "Self-Portrait with Imaginary Brother", "Two Men
Standing" (shown here)), and "Glazier". His early paintings, focusing on
figures of clothed men, contain elements inspired by Gorky's work as
well as that of Picasso and
Ingres. In 1948, with his first one-man show, de Kooning was
painting in an extremely abstract style, frequently in black and white
in the vein of Jackson Pollock though retaining a definite figurative
quality in his work. This exhibition was to establish his reputation,
confirmed two years later, with one of his most admired works
'Excavation'. |
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 De
Kooning had painted women regularly in the early 1940s and again from
1947 to 1949. The biomorphic shapes of his early abstractions can be
interpreted as female symbols. 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, which went through innumerable metamorphoses before it
was finished in 1952. 'Woman I' (1950-1952), with its glaring black eyes
and disturbing grin provoked dismay amongst critics and public alike,
yet it became one of the most reproduced paintings in the USA. De
Kooning took an unusually long time to create Woman, I, making numerous
preliminary studies and repainting the work repeatedly. 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 savagely applied pigment and the use of
colors that seem vomited on his canvas 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. By the late Fifties de Kooning moved to Long Island, although he still commuted back and forth to Manhattan, a journey that is represented in his highway images of 1957 to 1958. De Kooning returned to Holland in 1968 for a major retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. A year later he began to sculpt, modeling figures in clay and later casting them in bronze. "I am an eclectic artist by choice; I can open almost any book of reproductions and find a painting I could be influenced by." Willem de Kooning. |
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