Willem de Kooning (Rotterdam, April 24, 1904 - Long Island, March 19, 1997) was a Dutch painter, sculptor and draughtsman who became a naturalized American citizen.
Willem de Kooning's Biography
Willem's parents, Leendert de Kooning and Cornelia Nobel, divorced when he was about five years old. De Kooning lived first with his father and then with his mother.
He left school in 1916 and became an apprentice in a commercial artists' firm. Until 1924 he attended evening classes at the Academie van Beeldende Kunsten en Technische Wetenschappen (Academy of Fine Arts and Applied Sciences) in Rotterdam, visited museums in Belgium, and took art lessons in Brussels and Antwerp.
In 1926 he traveled to the United States as a stowaway on the ship Shelley, a British freighter bound for Argentina, and on August 15 he docked in Newport News, Virginia. He lived in a sailors' boarding house and initially worked as a wall painter. In 1927 he moved to Manhattan, New York, where he opened a workshop, supporting himself with carpentry work, house painting, and commercial art.
De Kooning began to dedicate himself to painting as an artist during his free time, and in 1928 he joined the artists' colony in Woodstock, New York. During this period he made contacts with some modernist artists active in the city.
Among them were the American Stuart Davis, the Armenian Arshile Gorky, and the Russian John Graham, whom De Kooning called the "Three Musketeers. Gorky became a close friend and, for at least ten years, an important influence.
Balcomb Greenedisse that "De Kooning virtually adored Gorky"; according to Aristodimos Kaldis, "Gorky was De Kooning's master." De Kooning's drawing Self-portrait with imaginary brother, circa 1938, may show him with Gorky; the pose of the figures is that of a photograph of Gorky with Peter Busa circa 1936.
In 1934 he joined the Artists Union group, and in 1935 worked on the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, for which he designed several murals.
None of them were executed, but a sketch for one was included in the show New Horizons in American Art at the Museum of Modern Art, his first group exhibition. From 1937, when De Kooning had to leave the Federal Art Project because he did not have American citizenship, he began working full time as an artist, earning money from commissions and teaching classes.
In 1938 he began his series entitled Women, which caused a sensation in the art circuit, with a theme that would become recurrent in his production. In the 1940s he joined a group of artists, including Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, who would form the so-called New York School.
They struggled to find a personal path that would overcome the great currents of the time, such as cubism, surrealism, and regionalism. Their emotive gestures and abstract pieces were the result of their attempt to distance themselves from the other movements.
The style they inaugurated became known as abstract expressionism or action painting. In April 1948 he opened his first solo show at the Charles Egan Gallery, which marked his consecration as a major artist. The show included a series of black and white abstractions he had begun in 1946.
In 1951 he received the Logan Medal and the Art Institute of Chicago's Purchase Award for his large-scale abstraction Excavation (1950). In this period he received important support from Clement Greenberg and later from Harold Rosenberg, the two most influential critics active in New York.
The women of the early 1950s were followed by abstract cityscapes, park views, rural landscapes, and, in the 1960s, a new group of women. In 1962 he obtained US citizenship and in 1963 he settled in a large studio in East Hampton. In 1964 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
In 1968 he visited Holland for the first time since 1926 for the opening of his retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In Rome in 1969 he made his first experiments in sculpture, with small figures modeled in clay and later cast in bronze, and in 1970-71 he began a series of life-size figures.
In 1979 he received the Andrew W. Mellon Award, accompanied by an exhibition at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. By 1989 he was still painting and exhibiting, although already afflicted by Alzheimer's disease, which would eventually lead to his disability. His last work dates from 1991. He died in New York in 1997 at the age of 92.
He was married to Elaine Fried, also an artist. They met in 1938 and married in 1943, but it was a tumultuous union. They kept an open marriage, and both spent seasons struggling with alcoholism, depression, and lack of financial resources.
They separated in 1957 but did not divorce, and in 1976 they moved back together. Elaine maintained relationships with prominent figures in the art world and that helped her husband's career. Willem had a daughter, Lisa de Kooning, in 1956 as a result of his affair with Joan Ward.
Willem de Kooning's Work
His early works were figurative, and his path toward abstraction was linked to the lyrical and liberalizing impact of the jazz he experienced in New York, as were other artists of the time.
He absorbed teachings from Fernand Léger, under whose direction he designed murals for the Works Progress Administration's art program, from Arshile Gorky, from Pablo Picasso's cubism, and to some extent followed the postulates of Clement Greenberg, one of the most influential art critics of the mid-twentieth century, who said that the arts have always been related to each other, and that it was time for painting to seek its own autonomy as a language.
This stance led to a search for the formal and aesthetic means that would be characteristic of painting. For Greenberg, painting had hitherto been founded on the primacy of theme, which for him was typical of literature, and he understood that the proposals of modernism correctly directed painting toward the primacy of form.
Moreover, he emphasized that painting should be flat, that is, strictly contained within the dimension of the support, without an accumulative materiality that would produce reliefs or volumes, which would be proper of sculpture.
De Kooning did not incorporate Greenberg's dictum literally. His best-known production maintains links with themes and with figuration, and even if figures are almost completely dissolved in abstraction, often figures or suggestions of figures remain a perceptible reference.
For the critic Bert Stern, his paintings, bold for the time, were not about a representation of the natural, what he and his colleagues in Abstract Expressionism wanted was to use aesthetic language to express what would be their personal emotions and visual poetics, and although the form suggested elements of nature, whether of the human body, landscape, or interiors, "it is not meant to describe them.
It is meant to communicate the artists' emotions." Materiality, too, acquires a significant emphasis in his production, with highly visible brushstrokes, impashes, drips, collages, and textures.
In fact, the brushstroke as a determinant of expressiveness is an absolutely defining element of his mature work, associating itself with the style of action painting, a subcategory of abstract expressionism named by Harold Rosenberg, another extremely influential critic, who preached that the canvas should be an arena for the painter's action, where gesture becomes a central aspect.
Rosenberg was thinking of Jackson Pollock's work when he coined the term action painting, but De Kooning's approach is quite different.
Although he is usually linked to Abstract Expressionism, he links himself more specifically to the genre of action painting, of which he was one of the most important representatives.
The artist categorically refused belonging or affiliation to specific art movements, and rejected the term action painting. According to Gabriel San Martin, to consider de Kooning only an abstract artist is an inadequate reductionism, "it seems to me that it is in de Kooning that, for the first time, the canvas shows itself capable of being transformed into a gestural yet figurative arena, different from what Greenberg and Rosenberg thought.
In his famous series of female portraits Woman (Women), from the fifties, his synthetic, rough and violent stroke reveals the spontaneity and expressiveness of his artistic impulse.
The great peculiarity definitely consists in the fact that, despite having the canvas transformed into an arena, De Kooning often has as his motif the composition of a figure.
What seems abstract at a first careless glance, in view of the artist's ability to formulate a lyrical decomposition not far from the level of those generated by the cubists at the beginning of their analytical period, does not take long to be perceived as a figure".
For Luiz Carlos Leite, even in his most abstract moments, De Kooning's painting frequently refers to the concrete world, whether in the titles of the works, or in the repertoire of abstract gestures he developed to synthesize his impression and reminiscences of nature, people, and places that were relevant to him.
His production was one of the main links between European modernism and the New York School. According to Patricia Failing, "in the late 1950s, in the opinion of many, the most influential painter active in the world was the abstract expressionist master William de Kooning.
Although he only had his first solo show in 1948, de Kooning had already acquired a formidable reputation in the underground, which served to propel him to prominence, along with Jackson Pollock, as one of the leading exponents of action painting.