Willem de Kooning’s Life and Paintings

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) was a Dutch-born American artist known for his work in the abstract expressionist style. He was considered one of the leaders of the New York School, which counted Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and Robert Motherwell among its members. Throughout his long career, de Kooning continued to experiment, noting that “you have to change to stay the same."

Although he was born in the Netherlands, de Kooning’s career as a painter took off when he moved to New York, where he remained until his death.

• Early years: Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam, Netherlands, in 1904. He apprenticed for local working artists in his teens, and attended the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques, now named the Willem de Kooning Academy.
• Move to America: At the age of 22, de Kooning traveled to Hoboken, New Jersey as a stowaway on a ship. He worked as a house painter there for a year before relocating to New York City. During the Great Depression, de Kooning joined the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which prompted him to pursue painting full-time.
• Abstract expressionism: In the late 1940s and early 1950s, de Kooning and some of his contemporaries began to reject the tenets of surrealism, cubism, and american regionalism. In breaking ties with these movements, the artists focused instead on abstract paintings that contained emotive, gestural brushstrokes. These techniques later became known as action painting, abstract expressionism, or the New York School and would shift eyes from the Paris art scene, dominated by Pablo Picasso’s groundbreaking work, to New York–based American artists in the years after World War II.
• Critical acclaim: At the age of 44, de Kooning gained critical acclaim at his first one-man exhibition held at Charles Egan Gallery, where he exhibited oil and enamel paintings. Shortly after the exhibit, the Logan Medal and Purchase Prize from the Art Institute of Chicago funded de Kooning’s grand-scale abstraction called Excavation, which is now known as one of the most seminal paintings of the twentieth century. New York critics, Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg, praised de Kooning’s work during these years.
• The Women series: De Kooning’s Women paintings, a series of figural works, shocked the art world in 1953 after they were exhibited at the Sidney Janis Gallery. Rather than creating portraits of women, the women in this series were seen as more types or icons. Many viewed de Kooning’s return to figuration as a betrayal of abstract expressionist principles, which were noted for the emphasis on abstraction. However, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) purchased Woman I, embracing this new style. De Kooning continued to experiment over the following years. He worked with both paper and canvas, brush and ink, as well as lithography. In the late ’50s, he incorporated the women he was painting into landscapes.
• Move to East Hampton: By 1963, de Kooning left New York City and moved to East Hampton, Long Island. He loved the light and landscape of the area, which reminded him of Holland and inspired his experimentation. The 1970s were a prolific decade for de Kooning, during which time he produced thickly painted and sensually abstract works that resulted from lots of experimentation and travels. Throughout the 1980s, de Kooning found his stride with serene paintings that depicted broad open areas in vivid color. They were years where de Kooning embraced simplistic, ordinary characters and objects in his abstract paintings.
• Final years and legacy: De Kooning produced his last painting in 1991 and passed away at the age of 92 in 1997, leaving an extraordinary history of art behind him. His works are on display around the world, including at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and a retrospective at the MoMA in New York, to name a few.

Willem de Kooning’s work is characterized by radical abstraction and gestural movements.

1. 1. Human figures: Unlike most of his colleagues, de Kooning was known for painting human figures, most notably women. He explored these figures in multiple ways, some of which placed them in landscapes where they became blended and distorted.
2. 2. Reworked canvases: De Kooning’s process of reworking his canvas often left his paintings feeling incomplete, as though the figures themselves were in the midst of motion.
3. 3. Quick brushstrokes: Quick brushstrokes, which produce a feeling of action and movement, are found in both de Kooning’s earlier and later works. The fluidity of his paints reflects his craftsmanship and previous career as a house painter.

De Kooning produced hundreds of paintings and sculptures during his lifetime. These works from the 1940s show his evolution during that critical time.

1. 1. Seated Woman (c.1940): Commissioned for a portrait, de Kooning painted Elaine Fried (a painter who would later marry the artist and become Elaine de Kooning) as the subject of this painting. As the woman sits upright in a chair with one leg crossed over the other, her body parts look like floating shapes, which can be interpreted as heavily influenced by Picasso’s fractured forms.
   
2. 2. Untitled (1948–49): Compositions of black and white, these paintings reflected various shapes and figures that created a dynamic composition, and attested to de Kooning’s exploration of surface and depth.
3. 3. Pink Angels (1945): The vibrant colors of this painting connotes a stage in de Kooning’s evolution from figuration to abstraction. Charcoal lines intersect with pink and golden areas, where de Kooning would trace shapes from paper onto his canvas.

Grab the MasterClass Annual Membership and plumb the depths of your creativity with the help of modern artist Jeff Koons, abstract artist Futura, and stage designer Es Devlin. Our exclusive video lessons will teach you to do things like utilize color and scale, explore the beauty in everyday objects, and so much more.