Willem De Kooning
Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) was a Dutch-American painter born in Rotterdam, Netherlands. He was a first-generation Abstract Expressionist and part of the New York School, alongside painters such as Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Mark Rothko.
De Kooning left school in 1916 and became an apprentice in a firm of a commercial artist. Until 1924, he attended evening classes at the Academie van Beeldende Kunsten, now renamed as the Willem de Kooning Academie, where he was drawn to the early abstraction of form founded in Cubism.
In 1926, de Kooning moved to New Jersey, USA, and worked as a house painter. He adopted large brushes and fluid paint to create artworks, a practice that he continued to utilize throughout his career. He then moved to New York and met with other contemporaries, such as Arshile Gorky, who was hugely influential to him. De Kooning married Elaine de Kooning (née Fried) in 1943. She was also an artist actively involved in Abstract Expressionism in the post-World War II era. De Kooning was deeply affected by Arshile Gorky’s death in 1948, which directed his stylistic transition towards dark and violent paintings. The thematic transitioning later developed into de Kooning’s notable use of abstracting the human figures. The peak of this richly emotive expressive style is evident in de Kooning’s Woman series begun in 1952, where he depicted female bodies in an abstract, aggressive, and loosely rendered form.
De Kooning was featured in many solo exhibitions from 1948 to 1966, primarily in New York, but also nationally and internationally. He has exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Smith College Museum of Art, and the Charles Egan Gallery. From 2011–2012, the Museum of Modern Art held a major retrospective of de Kooning’s work.