Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning, (April 24, 1904, Rotterdam, Netherlands – March 19, 1997, East Hampton, New York, USA) was a Dutch-born American painter, one of the leading proponents of Abstract Expressionism, especially its known form. Officially in action. Throughout the 1930s and '40s, de Kooning worked simultaneously in figurative and abstract modes, but by about 1945 the two trends seemed to fuse. The Women's I–VI series became a sensation with its fierce images and impulsive, energetic technique. His later work showed an increasing preoccupation with landscape.
Early Life and Work
De Kooning's parents, Leendert de Kooning and Cornelia Nobel, divorced when he was about five years old, and he was raised by his mother and stepfather. In 1916 he apprenticed at a firm of commercial artists and decorators, and at about the same time enrolled in night classes at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques, where he studied for eight years. He started working for the art director of a department store in 1920.
In 1926, de Kooning entered the United States as a stowaway and eventually settled in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he made a living as a painter. In 1927 he moved to a studio in Manhattan and came under the influence of artist, expert, and art critic John Graham and painter Arshile Gorky. Gorky became one of de Kooning's closest friends.
From about 1928, de Kooning began to paint still lifes and figure compositions reflecting the Parisian school and Mexican influences. By the early 1930s he was exploring abstraction using biomorphic shapes and simple geometric compositions – the contrast of different formal elements that dominated his work throughout his career. These early works bear strong affinities with those of his friends Graham and Gorky and reflect the influence of Pablo Picasso and Surrealist Joan Miró, both of whom achieved powerful expressive compositions through biomorphic forms.
In October 1935, Kooning began work on the WPA (Works Advancement Administration) Federal Art Project. He was employed by this work-assistance program until July 1937, when he was forced to resign due to his foreign status. This nearly two-year period provided the artist, who made a living from commercial work during the Early Depression, the first opportunity to devote all his time to creative work. He worked on both the easel painting and mural parts of the project (the few murals he designed were never implemented).
In 1938, probably under Gorky's influence, de Kooning embarked on a series of sad, staring male figures, including Two Men Standing, The Man, and the Seated Figure (Classic Male). In parallel with these works, he also created lyrical colorful abstractions such as Pink Landscape and Requiem. This coincidence of figures and abstractions continued into the 1940s with the representative but somewhat geometricized Woman and Standing Man, as well as numerous anonymous abstractions whose biomorphic forms increasingly suggest the presence of figures. Around 1945 the two trends seemed to fuse perfectly in Pink Angels. In 1946, being too poor to buy artists' pigments, he turned to black and white home enamels to make a series of large abstractions; Of these works, Light in August (c. 1946) and Black Friday (1948) are essentially black with white elements, while Zurich (1947) and Mailbox (1947–48) are white with black. Complex, agitated abstractions that developed from these works in the period after their first exhibition, such as Asheville (1948-49), Attic (1949), and Excavation (1950), have reintroduced color and seem to outline issues with strained determination. free-associative composition that he struggled with for years.
In 1938, Kooning met Elaine Fried, whom he married in 1943. He also became an important artist. In the 1940s and beyond, he became increasingly identified with the Abstract Expressionist movement and was recognized as one of its leaders by the mid-1950s. He had his first one-man exhibition of black and white enamel compositions at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York in 1948, and taught at Black Mountain College, North Carolina in 1948, and the Yale School of Art in 1948.
Old Jobs
De Kooning regularly painted women in the early 1940s and from 1947 to 1949, and while the biomorphic shapes of his early abstractions could be interpreted as female symbols, it wasn't until 1950 that he began to explore the female-only subject. In the summer of that year, she began Woman I, which underwent countless metamorphoses until it ended in 1952. She also painted other women during this period. These works were shown at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1953 and caused a sensation, as many of his Abstract Expressionist friends were figurative and obvious techniques and imagery when painting abstract. The brutally applied use of pigment and colors that seem to vomit on her canvas combine to reveal a woman who is highly attuned to some of the modern man's most common sexual fears. Toothy grunts, overripe, drooping breasts, frivolous eyes, and burst limbs reflected the darkest Freudian insights. Paintings of Women II through VI (1952–53), such as The Woman and the Bicycle (1953) and Two Women in the Country (1954), are variants of this theme. The deliberate vulgarity of these paintings contrasts with French painter Jean Dubuffet's no less harsh 1950 series Corps de dame, in which the female, shaped by a rich topography of earthy colours, engages more directly with universal symbols.
By 1955, however, de Kooning seems to have turned to this symbolic aspect of the woman, as the title of his Woman as Landscape suggests, in which the vertical figure seems to have been receded into an almost abstract background. Then, the likes of Police Gazette, Gotham News, Backyard onth Street, Parc Rosenberg, Suburb in Havana, Door to the River and Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point evolve from complexity of composition and color to broadly painted simplicity.
Around 1963, the year he moved permanently to East Hampton, Long Island, Kooning returned to portraying women in paintings such as Pastorale and Clam Diggers. In the mid-1960s, she rediscovered the theme in her paintings, which were as controversial as her earlier women. In these works, which are read as satirical attacks on female anatomy, Kooning paints with a flamboyant slickness in accordance with the non-shy subject. His later works, such as Whose Name Is Written on Water and Untitled III, are lyrical, lush, and sparkle with light and reflections on water. In her last years, she turned to more and more clay sculpture production.
In the 1980s, too, Kooning was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and a court ruled that he was unfit to manage his estate that had been transferred to the guardians. As the quality of his later work deteriorated, his earlier work saw increasing profits. At Sotheby's auctions, The Pink Lady (1944) sold for $3.6 million in 1987 and Interchange (1955) was sold for $20.6 million in 1989. De Kooning received the Japanese Art Association's Praemium Imperiale award in 1989.
