Willem de Kooning (1904-1997)
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch American abstract expressionist. Born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, de Kooning studied at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Art (which is now called the Willem de Kooning Acadmie). In 1926 de Kooning traveled as a stowaway on a freighter headed for Argentina. He wound up in Virginia and eventually settled in New York where he quickly joined an artist colony in Woodstock. At this time de Kooning met the New York abstract expressionists: Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorsky, Mark Rothko, etc.
Nearly a decade after arriving in the United States, de Kooning joined the Artists Union and was an employee of the Federal Art Project and the Works Progress Administration in the mural division. As a part of the New York School, he is considered to have one of the greatest facilities and polished techniques of the group. His paintings exemplify action painting and are like records of a violent encounter.
De Kooning’s paintings are abstract expressionist in style—though he never fully abandoned the figure. He used biomorphic shapes and simple geometric compositions, combined with strong, bold colors. As his work progressed, the heightened colors and elegant lines of the abstractions began to creep into the more figurative works, and the coincidence of figures and abstractions continued well into the 1940s. This period includes numerous untitled abstractions whose biomorphic forms increasingly suggest the presence of figures. In 1946, too poor to buy artists' pigments, he turned to black and white household enamels to paint a series of large abstractions. Developing out of these works were complex, agitated abstractions which reintroduced color and summed up with taut decisiveness the problems of free-associative composition he had struggled with for many years. De Kooning’s work can be found in virtually every modern art museum in the world.