Biography from Albert Allen Gallery:
| Willem de Kooning Biography
1904 Born in Rotterdam, Holland
1916 Enrolled, Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts & Letters, Rotterdam, Holland
1926 Immigrated to the United States
1934 Joined the Artist's Union
1935 Joined mural division, W.P.A. Federal Art Project
1962 Became United States Citizen
1964 Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom by Lyndon B. Johnson, Washington, DC
1975 Awarded Gold Medal, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY
1982 Elected member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Germany
1985 Awarded National Medal of Arts by U.S. President Ronald Reagan, Washington, DC
1997 Died
Selected Exhibitions
1984 Willem de Kooning - Zeichnungen, Gemälde, Skulpturen, Akademie der Künste Berlin, Germany
1983 Willem de Kooning: The North Atlantic Light, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Holland
1976 - 1977 Willem de Kooning: Painting and Sculpture, organized by the Smithsonian Institution Washington, DC (exhibition opened in Belgrade, Yugoslavia)
1976 - 1977 Paris-New York, Centre Georges Pompidou Paris, France
1958 The New American Painting, Museum of Modern Art New York, NY
1953 Retrospective, School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA
1950 Venice Biennale Venice, Italy
1948 De Kooning, Egan Gallery New York, NY
1948 Annual Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art New York, NY
1944 Abstract and Surrealist Art in America, Mortimer Brandt Gallery
New York, NY
1942 American and French Painting, McMillen Inc. New York, NY
1936 New Horizons in American Art, Museum of Modern Art New York, NY
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Biography from Artbrokering.com:
| Born
in 1904, Willem deKooning was one of the most recognized proponents of
the Abstract Expressionism/New York School movement. Born in Holland
and making his way to the United States in the 1920s, deKooning made
a profound mark on the art world, not only through his masterful and
brazenly paintings of women and landscapes, but on the multitude of
other major Twentieth century artists whose styles and careers he
influenced. Unlike many of his peers, deKooning was not a prolific
print maker.
Throughout his four decades of work, he created
less than one-hundred print editions, a majority of which were the lush
black and white images done in the sixties and seventies.
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Biography from AskART:
| Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam, Holland on April 24, 1904. His father, Leenert, was a wine and beer distributor who won custody of young Willem when his parents separated about five years after his birth. His mother, Cornelia Nobel de Kooning, ran a tough seamen's bar, and snatched the boy back soon after. At the age of twelve, with elementary school behind him, de Kooning entered an informal apprenticeship with commercial artists and designers, Jan and Jaay Gidding, who also provided his art education. They enrolled him in night courses at the Rotterdam Akademie voor Beeldende Kunsten en Wettenschappen, where he studied academic art and crafts. His first jobs were in commercial art, including a year in Belgium during which he visited museums and studied.
He came to the United States illegally in 1926 and settled in Hoboken, New Jersey, which had a large Dutch community, while he learned English. He began his career as a house painter. When he saw an ad in a New York newspaper for someone to do commercial artwork, he went to New York and for many years he did lettering, sign painting and carpentry. In 1935 he was employed doing murals for the Federal Arts project; the same year he did his first easel painting and his first independent commission was for part of a mural for the New York World's Fair of 1939 and 1940. A series of black and white abstractions in the late 1940s were the subject of his first one-man show. He chose black and white for the simple reason that the neutral paints were less expensive, but the works were considered his best by many experts. In 1943 he married Elaine Fried, who was one of his art students. In 1948 they visited East Hampton as weekend guests of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner.
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De Kooning's pride and joy was his studio, built between 1963 and 1969 to his specifications. He spent most of his day there. Besides hard work, his other pleasures were seeing movies and bicycle riding. He designed the huge studio with 30-foot ceilings, white walls and large expanses of glass, allowing all available light to pour in.
Despite his quick American assimilation, de Kooning's ties to Holland surfaced on occasion. It is significant that though in 1964 de Kooning was awarded America's highest civilian award, the Medal of Freedom, he had remained a Dutch citizen for almost forty years after arriving here.
The whole myth of American life, the vulgarity, the bigness, the overstatements, appealed to De Kooning. He could find inspiration in aspects of American culture that Americans tend to be repulsed by. He repeatedly told visitors that he had gotten the idea of mixing his colors from the ice-cream counter at Howard Johnson's, where twenty-eight variously colored flavors were shown off in buckets.
Like many artists, De Kooning had frequent periods of self-doubt while painting. A doctor friend told him to take a brandy in the morning; as a result, he became a drunk. His alcoholism contributed to the disintegration of his marriage and they separated in 1955. They never divorced and she remained his close friend and colleague. After the separation, DeKooning, who was always attractive to women, moved in with Joan Ward, a commercial artist. When De Kooning was fifty-two, their daughter, Lisa, was born. Three years later deKooning moved to Rome with Ruth Kligman, an artist's model. But his alcoholic blackouts grew worse, interspersed with periods in drying-out wards, until 1978 when Elaine finally persuaded him to go to Alcoholics Anonymous. She secretly gave him a drug, Antabuse, that made him sick when he drank. By 1980 he was through the worst. The originator of a boisterous idea of painting-as-adventure, he had gotten lost in a haze of often violent alcoholism and was almost never able to paint. The period between 1978 and 1981 in a retrospective at the National Gallery of Art was represented by a single work. In the 1980s, however, a newly sober De Kooning suddenly became productive once again, although he also began to slide into what the doctors believe is Alzheimer's disease.
De Kooning used a variety of tricks to pump up the sensuously inviting tactility of his surfaces, including his famous wet-on-wet technique of mixing salad oil in the pigment, in order to make it slithery, fluid and receptive to sustained periods of work. It didn't dry out fast. As he worked he would repeatedly scrape down the surface, leaving layered smears and traces of underpaint to show through, like insistent memories of past encounters piling up one on top of the other. His paintings can look slatternly, as if they've been around. He rarely painted either males or reclining figures.
De Kooning's circle of friends consisted either of old acquaintances of many years' duration or people introduced to him by a trusted group of advisors who shielded him from exploitation. In this second category is former Beatle, Paul McCartney, whose wife, Linda Eastman, was the daughter of De Kooning's lawyer, Lee Eastman. The McCartneys always came to visit when they were in East Hampton.
Great artists have collided with mortality throughout history, but none has done it in quite the way that De Kooning has. His last paintings were those made between 1981 and 1990; then he laid down his brushes for good and became an invalid tended around the clock. He died on Wednesday, March 19, 1997.
Sources:
The Later Years by Christopher Knight, LA Times, October 9, 1995
New World Ardor by Christopher Knight, LA Times, May 29, 1994
Myrna Oliver , Obituary in the LA Times, March 20, 1997
ARTnews, February 1982
Dutch Master by Patrick Pacheco in Art & Antiques, September 1994 .
Article in ARTnews,Summer 1989 by Andrew Decker
Painted Women by Linda Nochlin in Art in America, November 1998
Written and compiled by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher of Laguna Woods, California.
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Biography from AskART:
| The leader in Abstract Expressionism in the mid-20th century, Willem de
Kooning was the founder of the New York School of action
painting. For him and his followers, process in creating their
work was as important as the final result. He was married to
Elaine de Kooning, also an artist, whose promotion of him through
writing, lectures, and socializing is thought to be a key factor in his
success.
He was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, a tidy,
organized country whose culture was a marked contrast to his chaotic
approaches to canvases. In 1916, he apprenticed as a commercial
artist, and for eight years during his commercial art career, attended
evening classes at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and
Techniques. During this time, he was exposed to the De Stijl
geometric design movement led by Piet Mondrian and to the Cubists in
Paris including Pablo Picasso.
De Kooning spent two years in
Belgium and emigrated as a stowaway on a boat to New York City in
1926. He lived in Hoboken, New Jersey and earned money as a house
painter while doing his own painting in the evenings. He also
worked for federal arts projects, the W.P.A. and F.A.P., and did
American Scene-style painting at that time. He became a friend of
and was much influenced by Arshile Gorky, with whom he explored Cubism
and other modernist methods. Gorky's suicide in 1948 was a terrible
blow to DeKooning, and seemed to inspire an unleashing of violent,
highly emotive paintings that were much more aggressive and violent
with elements of accident playing an increasing role in composition.
From
the mid 1940s, he had been making a living as a fine artist and
developed as New York's major avant-garde figure. In 1948, he had
his first one-man show, which was black and white paintings, and by the
1950s was the dominant leader of the Abstract Expressionist movement
emulated across the country. However, as years passed, he became
more sought after as a philosopher of the movement than for his
artwork, which some critics thought declined in quality as his
reputation built.
In the 1930s and 40, his work had major themes
of abstracted human figures and pure abstraction. Many of his
pieces were flattened biomorphic forms suspended in space with ragged
edges and unfinished appearance. His depictions of women, which
many have thought to be demeaning, began in the late 1930s and were at
first semi-realistic but by the 1940s were distorted and intermingled
with background colors.
In 1946, he began a series of black
and white paintings that gave the appearance of all restraint having
been lifted because of their slap/dash markings, jagged and torn edges,
and random splashes of paint. However, his works seemed always to
have a central axis point, a characteristic from his European training
and something that set him apart from other Abstract Expressionists.
After
1950, DeKooning focused on the theme of women and their various roles
of maternal figure, sexual partner, and destructive force. Most
of the works are ambiguous and suggest a variety of
interpretations. Some of his paintings during this period were
pure abstractions made with swift gestures, but they did not have the
velocity or energy of his contemporary Jackson Pollock.
Sources include:
Matthew Baigell, Dictionary of American Art
Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art
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