Willem de Kooning, born on April 24, 1904, showed a keen interest in art from a young age, prompting him to enroll in night classes at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques. In 1926, with the assistance of his friend Leo Cohan, he boarded a ship to the United States, and he settled in New York City the following year. There, after exploring various professional directions, he committed himself entirely to painting.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, de Kooning, alongside his New York contemporaries such as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, gained renown for challenging established stylistic conventions. They achieved this by disrupting the traditional relationship between foreground and background and employing paint to convey emotional and abstract expressions. This movement has been variously labeled as Action Painting, Abstract Expressionism or simply New York School. With this group of artists, the center of gravity of the Western art system shifted from Paris, which had held the primacy of art capital since the beginning of the century, to New York.
In 1948, at the age of forty-four, Willem de Kooning held his inaugural solo exhibition at the Charles Egan Gallery, showcasing his iconic black-and-white enamel paintings for the first time. Notably, in 1951, de Kooning made one of his first major sales when he earned the Logan Medal and Purchase Prize from the Art Institute of Chicago for his large-scale abstraction titled Excavation (1950), regarded as one of the most important paintings of the 20th century. Concurrently, de Kooning also garnered the support of Clement Greenberg and later Harold Rosenberg, two prominent and rival critics in the New York. In 1953, Willem de Kooning stirred the art world with a series of boldly executed figurative pieces, famously referred to as Women. This departure from abstraction to figuration was viewed by some as a departure from the principles of Abstract Expressionism, which prioritized abstraction. Nevertheless, the Museum of Modern Art in New York embraced de Kooning’s stylistic evolution and recognized it as a progression in his oeuvre, acquiring Woman I(1950-1952) in 1953. What appeared as a stylistic regression to some was unequivocally avant-garde to others.
From September 1959 to January 1960, Willem de Kooning sojourned in Italy, in Rome, where he had the privilege of engaging with Alberto Burri, Afro Basaldella, and Cy Twombly. It was during this period that he produced a series of experimental black-and-white works on paper, named the Rome drawings. Upon his return, de Kooning went to the West Coast. In San Francisco, he delved into brushwork and ink techniques, while also immersing himself in the exploration of lithography. The two resulting prints, known as Waves I and Waves II, marked the pioneering into abstract expressionist printing. In 1963, Willem de Kooning moved from New York to Springs, East Hampton, Long Island. MoMA organized a traveling solo exhibition between 1968 and 1969. This exhibition journeyed through prestigious venues such as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Tate Gallery in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. During a brief excursion to Italy in 1969, spurred by a meeting with sculptor Herzl Emmanuel, de Kooning created thirteen small clay figures, subsequently cast in bronze. In the early 1970s, Willem de Kooning embarked on a dual exploration of sculpture and lithography, generating a substantial body of work alongside his ongoing endeavors in painting and drawing. His lithographs revealed the influence of Japanese ink drawing and calligraphy, evident in the portrayal of expansive, open spaces characteristic of many of his lithographs. This newfound sense of spatial depth observed in his lithographs also found resonance in certain paintings. The paintings of the 1980s represent a culmination of Willem de Kooning’s artistic journey, epitomizing the synthesis between figuration and abstraction, painting and drawing, balance and disequilibrium. Throughout this decade, de Kooning delved into novel forms of pictorial space, characterized by the juxtaposition of brightly colored, predominantly linear elements with muted white areas. A significant milestone during this period was the 1983 exhibition titled Willem de Kooning: Drawings – Paintings – Sculptures organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art. Due to illness, de Kooning completed his final painting in 1991. He passed away in 1997, at the age of 92.