Willem de Kooning

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For the academy named after him, see Willem de Kooning Academy.

Willem de Kooning
East Hampton, New York[1]
NationalityDutch, American
Known forAbstract expressionism
Notable workWoman I, Easter Monday, Attic, Excavation
Spouse
​
(m. 1943)​
AwardsPresidential Medal of Freedom (1964)
Edward MacDowell Medal (1975)
National Medal of Arts (1986)
Praemium Imperiale (1989)
Signature

Willem de Kooning (

abstract expressionist artist. Born in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, he moved to the United States in 1926, becoming an American citizen in 1962.[3] In 1943, he married painter Elaine Fried
.

In the years after World War II, de Kooning painted in a style that came to be referred to as abstract expressionism or "action painting", and was part of a group of artists that came to be known as the New York School. Other painters in this group included Jackson Pollock, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, John Ferren, Nell Blaine, Adolph Gottlieb, Anne Ryan, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston, Clyfford Still, and Richard Pousette-Dart. De Kooning's retrospective held at MoMA in 2011–2012 made him one of the best-known artists of the 20th century.[4]

Biography

Plaque affixed on de Kooning's house of birth in Rotterdam, Netherlands

Willem de Kooning was born in

Willem de Kooning Academie.[3]
In 1926, de Kooning traveled to the United States as a
Dutch Seamen's Home in Hoboken, New Jersey, and found work as a house painter. In 1927, he moved to Manhattan, where he had a studio on West Forty-fourth Street. He supported himself with jobs in carpentry, house painting and commercial art.[3]

De Kooning began painting in his free time, and in 1928 he joined the

Peter Busa in about 1936.[6]
: 184 

Mural by de Kooning at the Hall of Pharmacy, 1939 New York World's Fair

De Kooning joined the

American realism
.

De Kooning met his wife,

American realism
and had been drawn to monochrome. Kline, who died young, was one of de Kooning's closest artist friends. Kline's influence is evident in de Kooning's calligraphic black images of this period.

During the late 1940s and early '50s, de Kooning joined other fellow contemporary artists including Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, in their struggle to break free from common artistic movements of the era including Cubism, Surrealism and Regionalism. Their emotive gestures and abstract pieces were a result of their attempt to abandon the other movements. This movement was later called "Abstract Expressionism" sometimes known as "Action Painting" and the "New York School".[7]

Between 1948 and 1953, de Kooning became more well known for his artistic techniques but he tried not to repeat himself.

De Kooning in 1968

In the late 1950s, de Kooning's work shifted away from the figurative work of the women (though he would return to that subject matter on occasion) and began to display an interest in more abstract, less representational imagery.

East Hampton, a house which Elaine's brother Peter Fried had sold to him two years before. He built a studio near by, and lived in the house to the end of his life.[3][9]

It was revealed that, toward the end of his life, de Kooning had begun to lose his memory in the late 1980s and had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease for some time.[9] This revelation has initiated considerable debate among scholars and critics about how responsible de Kooning was for the creation of his late work.[10]

Succumbing to the progression of his disease, de Kooning painted his final works in 1991. He died in 1997 at the age of 92[11] and was cremated.[12]

Marriage to Elaine de Kooning

Elaine had admired Willem's artwork before meeting him; in 1938 her teacher introduced her to de Kooning at a Manhattan cafeteria when she was 20 and he 34. After meeting, he began to instruct her in drawing and painting. They painted in Willem's loft at 143 West 21st Street, and he was known for his harsh criticism of her work, "sternly requiring that she draw and redraw a figure or still life and insisting on fine, accurate, clear linear definition supported by precisely modulated shading."[13] He even destroyed many of her drawings, but this "impelled Elaine to strive for both precision and grace in her work".[13] When they married in 1943, she moved into his loft and they continued sharing studio spaces.[13]

Elaine and Willem de Kooning had what was later called an open marriage; they both were casual about sex and about each other's affairs. Elaine had affairs with men who helped further Willem's career, such as Harold Rosenberg, who was a renowned art critic, Thomas B. Hess, who was a writer about art and managing editor for ARTnews, and Charles Egan, owner of the Charles Egan Gallery.

Willem had a daughter, Lisa de Kooning, in 1956, as a result of his affair with Joan Ward.[13] He also had a romance with Ruth Kligman after her affair with Jackson Pollock ended with his death in a car crash in 1956.[14]

Elaine and Willem both struggled with alcoholism, which eventually led to their separation in 1957.[13] While separated, Elaine remained in New York, struggling with poverty, and Willem moved to Long Island and dealt with depression. Despite bouts with alcoholism, they both continued painting. Although separated for nearly twenty years, they never divorced, and ultimately reunited in 1976.[13]

Work

Early work

De Kooning's paintings of the 1930s and early 1940s are abstract

Pablo Picasso.[1] In the same years, de Kooning also painted a series of solitary male figures, either standing or seated, against undefined backgrounds; many of these are unfinished.[1][3]

Black-and-white abstracts

By 1946, de Kooning had begun a series of black-and-white paintings, which he would continue into 1949. During this period he had his first one-man show at the Charles Egan Gallery in 1948 consisting largely of black-and-white works, although a few pieces have passages of bright color. De Kooning's black paintings are important to the history of abstract expressionism owing to their densely impacted forms, their mixed media, and their technique.[8]: 25 

Woman III, 1953, private collection

The Woman series

De Kooning as sculptor: Seated Woman on a Bench, bronze of 1972 (cast 1976), in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

De Kooning painted women regularly in the early and late 1940s, but it was not until 1950 that he began to explore the female subject exclusively. His well-known Woman series, begun in 1950 and culminating in Woman VI, owes much to Picasso, not least in the aggressive, penetrative breaking apart of the figure, and the spaces around it. Picasso's late works show signs that he, in turn, saw images of works by Pollock and de Kooning.[15]: 17  De Kooning led the 1950s art world into a new movement known as American

abstract expressionism. "From 1940 to the present, Woman has manifested herself in de Kooning's paintings and drawings as at once the focus of desire, frustration, inner conflict, pleasure, … and as posing problems of conception and handling as demanding as those of an engineer."[16] The female figure is an important symbol for de Kooning's art career and his own life. The Woman painting is considered as a significant work of art for the museum through its historical context about the post-World War II history and American feminist
movement. Additionally, the medium (oil, enamel, and charcoal on canvas) of this painting makes it different from others of de Kooning's time.

Notable works

The painter is noted for his paintings: Woman III (1953), Woman VI (1953), Interchange (1955), and Police Gazette (1955). Some notable sculptures are Clamdigger (1972/1976) and Seated Woman on a Bench (1972/1976).

Woman Standing - Pink, 1954-5 Willem de Kooning
Woman Standing - Pink, 1954-5 Willem de Kooning
Gansevoort Street (c. 1949), Willem de Kooning
Gansevoort Street (c. 1949), Willem de Kooning

Market reception

Some of de Kooning's paintings have been sold in the 21st century for record prices. In November 2006, the American business magnate

Steven A. Cohen for $137.5 million, just below the record at the time of $140 million, which involved the same people in the same month for Jackson Pollock's No. 5, 1948.[17] A month earlier Cohen had already paid Geffen $63.5 million for Police Gazette by de Kooning.[18] In September 2015, Geffen sold de Kooning's oil painting Interchange to hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin for ca. $300 million, the highest price paid for a painting at the time.[19] It held the record until November 15, 2017, when the da Vinci Salvator Mundi sold for $450 million at Christie's in New York.[20] In November 2016, Untitled XXV sold for $66.3 million at Christie's in New York. This was a record price for a de Kooning piece sold at public auction.[21]

According to Patricia Failing:

By the end of the 1950s, in the opinion of many, the most influential painter at work for the world was the abstract expressionist master William de Kooning. Although it was 1948 before he was given his first one man show, de Kooning had previously acquired a formidable underground reputation which served to boost him to prominence, along with Jackson Pollock, as a leading exponent of "action painting."[22]

Solo exhibitions

The artist was featured in a number of solo exhibitions from 1948 to 1966, many in New York but also nationally and internationally. Specifically, he had 14 separate exhibitions, with two exhibitions per annum in the years 1953, 1964, and 1965. He was featured at the

Martha Jackson Gallery, the Workshop Center, the Paul Kantor Gallery, the Hames Goodman Gallery, the Allan Stone Gallery, and the Smith College Museum of Art. Most of the exhibitions lasted for three weeks to one month.[8]: 126  Most recent exhibition, De Kooning: Five Decades, took place in the Mnuchin Gallery, New York City, from April 19 till June 15, 2019.[23]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d Christoph Grunenberg, et al. (2011). De Kooning: (1) Willem de Kooning. Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Accessed February 2015. (subscription required)
  2. ^ "de Kooning". The Collins English Dictionary, online edition. London: HarperCollins Publishers.
  3. ^ a b c d e f Tracy Schpero Fitzpatrick (2001). de Kooning, Willem. American National Biography Online, January 2001 update. Accessed February 2015. (subscription required)
  4. ^ McGlynn, Tom (June 5, 2019). "De Kooning: Five Decades". The Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved February 25, 2020.
  5. ^ Saunders, David (Summer 2005). "The Art and Social Conditions of John Walter Scott". Illustration (14): 5–35.
  6. ^
    ISBN 978-0-375-40378-1
    .
  7. ^ "The Artists". The Willem de Kooning Foundation. Retrieved January 2, 2021.
  8. ^
    ISBN 978-0-89659-332-9
    .
  9. ^ a b "Willem de Kooning Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works". The Art Story. Retrieved April 2, 2017.
  10. ISBN 978-3-8376-2710-7
    .
  11. ^ Stevens, Mark; Swan, Annalyn (2004). de Kooning: An American Master. Knopf. p. 629.
  12. ^ Stevens, Mark; Swan, Annalyn (2004). de Kooning: An American Master. Knopf. p. 689.
  13. ^ a b c d e f Hall, Lee. Elaine and Bill: Portrait of a Marriage.
  14. ^ (registration required) Kennedy, Randy (March 6, 2010). "Ruth Kligman, Muse and Artist, Dies at 80". The New York Times.
  15. ISBN 978-0-205-03440-6
    .
  16. ^ Willem de Kooning. Text by Harold Rosenberg. 29.
  17. ^ Vogel, Carol (November 18, 2006). "Landmark De Kooning Crowns Collection". The New York Times.
  18. ^ Vogel, Carol (October 12, 2006). "Works by Johns and de Kooning Sell for $143.5 Million". The New York Times.
  19. ^ "Billionaire drops $500M for 2 masterpieces," February 19, 2016, Bloomberg News, as republished by Fox News, at [1].
  20. ISSN 0099-9660
    . Retrieved November 16, 2017.
  21. ^ Duray, Dan (November 16, 2016). "De Kooning painting sells for record $66m at Christie's New York". The Art Newspaper. Archived from the original on December 1, 2016. Retrieved November 30, 2016.
  22. ^ John A. Garraty, ed., Encyclopedia of American Biography, 1974, pp. 269–270.
  23. ^ "April 19 – June 15, 2019 – Five Decades – De Kooning – Exhibitions – Mnuchin Gallery". www.mnuchingallery.com. Retrieved February 25, 2020.

Further reading

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Willem de Kooning.
Wikiquote has quotations related to Willem de Kooning.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Willem_de_Kooning&oldid=1219148125"