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Biographical Information:
Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam, Holland, in 1904 and emigrated to the USA as a stowaway on a ship in 1927. He completed successfully a childhood apprenticeship with a Dutch commercial artists' company which then allowed him to enter the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts where he studied for 8 years. There he learned what the de Stijl Group of Mondrian believed creative art should achieve.
In the US, de Kooning became a central figure of Abstract Expressionism. He first started out as a house painter, then a commercial designer and Sunday painter and subsequently became a full time artist. His first developments were heavily influenced by the direction taken by Arshile Gorky. Although he did not exhibit until 1948, de Kooning was an underground force among younger experimental artists by the early 1940s. As a painter he was able to shift between representational and abstract modes, which he never held to be mutually exclusive.
In the late 1940s, he painted a group of black and white abstractions in which he had fully assimilated the tenets of Cubism - "Painting" (1948). He was also working on large paintings of women and in 1950 he began his most famous canvas "Women, I" (1950-52), a monumental image of a seated woman in a sundress. His paintings of women were received with mixed criticism; they were read as misogynist. By the middle of the 1950s the women paintings gave way to compositions called "abstract urban landscapes" that, with their slashing lines and colliding forms, reflected the lively, gritty atmosphere of New York City streets - "Gotham News" (1955). "Gotham News" is a quintessential example of gestural Abstract Expressionism, the emotion-packed "gesture" in the brushstroke of the artist everywhere apparent.
In the 1960s de Kooning moved to a large, light-filled studio on Long Island where he continued his exploration of the woman theme. In "Two Figures in a Landscape" (1967) the figures are barely decipherable amidst baroque flourishes of lush, liquid paint. He continued to make paintings of figures into the 1970s, but even many of his later most abstract compositions contain allusions to the figure.
He continued to paint brilliantly into the 1980s and only stopped because of Alzheimer disease in the 1990s. His characteristic light and his palette of rose, yellow, green, blue and white, as well as his violent brushstroke gave way into a grandly fluid, almost Rubenesque flow of graceful color shapes in his later paintings - "Pirate" (1981).
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Artists Works:
de Kooning, Elaine Fried
De Kooning, Willem
De Kooning, Willem
De Kooning, Willem
De Kooning, Willem
De Kooning, Willem
De Kooning, Willem
de Kooning, Willem
De Kooning, Willem
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Commercial Resources:
VERED GALLERY
VERED GALLERY
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Related Information:
Abstract expressionism
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