Willem de Kooning
The forceful painter of Abstract Expressionism.
Willem de Kooning was a Dutchman in New York. His Woman series shocked with its violent painting of a female figure.
Willem de Kooning was born in 1904 in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. His parents divorced when he was small. He was apprenticed to a firm of decorative painters and studied in the evenings at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts. In 1926 he stowed away on a ship to the United States.
In New York he first worked as a house painter and commercial artist. During the Depression he found work on the government art project for unemployed artists and was able to devote himself entirely to art. He became a close friend of the painter Arshile Gorky. In 1943 he married the painter Elaine Fried, Elaine de Kooning, who also became an important critic.
His first solo exhibition in 1948 showed abstract pictures in black and white. Excavation of 1950, in the Art Institute of Chicago, is a large, densely interwoven composition regarded as one of the key works of Abstract Expressionism. De Kooning was one of the leading figures of the so-called New York School, and his painting is often described as action painting, in which the traces of movement and labour are visible in the paint.
In 1953 he exhibited the Woman series, in which female figures with staring eyes and toothy grins emerge from violent brushstrokes. Woman I of 1950–52 is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Many were outraged, both because he had returned to the figure and by the way the woman was portrayed. Later he painted freer, brighter landscape abstractions, and from 1963 he lived on Long Island. Interchange of 1955 sold in 2015 for one of the highest sums ever paid for a painting.
He long had problems with alcohol and in old age developed dementia. His paintings from the 1980s are therefore debated. He died in 1997. De Kooning is regarded as one of the greatest painters of the 20th century, and his violent, sensual brushwork has influenced generations of artists.