Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning (Rotterdam, April 24, 1904 - Long Island, March 19, 1997) was a Dutch-born American painter, an exponent of Expressionism in the years after World War II. abstract, and within this trend, of action painting or gestural painting, painters of this movement were Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still; later, de Kooning experimented with new art movements such as sculpture and performance.

Biography

Early Years

The painter's parents, Leendert de Kooning and Cornelia Nobel, divorced when he was about five years old, and he was raised by his mother and a stepfather. In 1916 he apprenticed with a firm of commercial artists and decorators, and, around the same time, he attended evening classes at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied for eight years. In 1920 he went to work with the artistic director of a department store. In 1926 he clandestinely emigrated to the United States, on the British ship SS Shelly , to Newport, Virginia. From there he went to Boston, from Boston to Rhode Island and from there, by boat, to New Jersey.

He eventually settled in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he made a living as a house painter. In 1927 he moved to a studio in Manhattan and was influenced by the artist and critic John D. Graham and the painter Arshile Gorky. Gorky was one of his close friends.

From 1928 de Kooning began to paint still lifes and figuratives that reflected the influence of the School of Paris and Mexico. In the early thirties he was exploring abstraction, using biomorphic shapes and simple geometric compositions, an opposition of disparate formal elements that is prevalent in his work throughout his career. These early works have a great affinity with those of his friends Graham and Gorky and reflect the impact that the Spanish Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró had on these young artists, both of whom had achieved powerfully expressive compositions through biomorphic forms.

In October 1935 de Kooning began working for the Works Progress Administration, a new federal government art project. He was hired by this program until July 1937, when he said goodbye to him along with his partner Santiago Martínez Delgado, due to his status as a foreigner. This period of about two years gave the artist, who had supported himself through the Great Depression by commercial jobs, the first opportunity to fully devote himself to creative work. Several murals that he designed were never completed.

In 1938, probably under the influence of Gorky, de Kooning embarked on a series of male figures, including Two Men Standing, Man, and Seated Figure (Classic Male), while simultaneously making a more purist series of lyrically colored abstractions, such as Pink Landscape and Elegy.

In 1938 he met Elaine Marie Fried, later known as Elaine de Kooning, whom he married in 1943 and who was also a significant artist.

During the 1940s he became increasingly identified with Abstract Expressionism, a movement of which he became one of its leaders in the mid-1950s. As his work evolved, the intense colors and graceful lines of the abstractions they began to become more figurative works, and the coincidence of figures and abstractions continued well into their forties.

This period includes the rather geometric representations of Woman and Standing Man, alongside numerous untitled abstractions whose biomorphic forms increasingly suggested the presence of figures, developing a type of semifigurative-semiabstract representation.

Around 1945 the two trends seemed to blend seamlessly into Pink Angels. In 1946, too poor to buy artist's pigments, he turned to black and white in home mixes to paint a series of grand 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. He had his first solo exhibition, consisting of black and white compositions, at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York in 1948.

From then on he became an outstanding figure of the artistic avant-garde. His work is oriented towards complex, restless abstractions, such as Asheville (1948/49), Attic (1949), and Excavation (1950; Art Institute, Chicago), which reintroduced color and seemed to sum up firmly the problems of composition by free association with which he had wrestled for years.

He taught at the Black Mountain College of North Carolina summer courses with John Cage, Buckminster Fuller and Josef Albers, and at the Yale School of Art in 1950/51. He traveled to Rome and San Francisco.

Mature Works

De Kooning had painted women regularly in the early 1940s, and again between 1947 and 1949. The biomorphic forms of his early abstractions can be interpreted as female symbols. But it was not until 1950 that she began to explore the subject of women exclusively. It is the time of her greatest artistic creativity. In the summer of that year he began what would be his most famous series, whose theme was women. It began with Woman I (Mujer I) (Museum of Modern Art, New York), which underwent countless metamorphoses before it was completed in 1952. In the same museum is Woman II (1952).

He conceived of art as "action linked to energy and bodily movement" (Christa von Lengerke), as something in which one works with an intense concentration directed exclusively to the creative act without predetermining its result. Kooning used sharp and violent brushstrokes, with thick layers of oil. This action painting produces an abstract and vigorous painting, of great density and very intense from the chromatic point of view. He made a painting "representative and gestural at the same time, something similar, saving the distances, to that of the Spanish Antonio Saura", according to Juan Antonio Ramírez.

The various paintings of women were shown at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1953 and caused a sensation for their stark technique and because they were figurative when most of their fellow expressionists were painting abstractions. The compositions are flat, impetuous, reflecting a degraded figure of a woman. The wildly applied pigment and the use of colors that seemed to be vomited onto the painting combined to reveal a woman who reflected all too well some of modern man's most pervasive sexual fears. Wide smiles, gleaming teeth, oversized breasts larger than heads, and swaying, large vacant eyes, opulent thighs, seem to represent Freud's darkest perceptions. It would be "a symbolic representation of women as a nurturing, predatory and abusive mother, a woman with an immense mouth and implacable gaze, a ghostly image of the man-eating woman" (Carrassat-Marcade).

He also showed some paintings that seemed to go back to early Mesopotamian and Akkadian works, with the huge, almost 'all-seeing' eyes.

For more than ten years, de Kooning devoted himself to painting this type of woman, an exaggerated caricature, "a transvestite of femininity idealized by media and clichés" (Lengerke). Paintings Woman II through VI (1952-53) are all variations on the same theme, as is Woman and Bicycle (1953; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) and Two Women in the Country (1954). The deliberate vulgarity of these paintings is reminiscent of the no less crude series Corps de Dame (1950) by the French painter Jean Dubuffet, in which the feminine, made up of a rich topography of earthy colours, is relate more directly to universal symbols.

In 1955, however, de Kooning seems to have returned to this symbolic aspect of women, as the title of his Woman as Landscape suggests, in which the upright figure seems almost absorbed by the landscape abstract. This was followed by a series of landscapes such as Police Gazette, Gotham News, Backyard on Tenth Street, Parc Rosenberg, Suburb in Havana, Door to the River, and Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point, which shows an evolution from colorful complexity to pictorial simplicity.

About 1963, the year he settled permanently in a Springs, Long Island studio, de Kooning returned to depicting women in paintings such as Pastorale and Clam Diggers. She re-explored the subject in the mid-1960s in paintings that were controversial as The Early Women of Him. In these works, which have been interpreted as satirical attacks on the female anatomy, de Kooning painted with extravagant lubricity.

Last years

A certain lyricism returns with his latest works, such as Whose Name Was Writ in Water and Untitled III; in them you shine the lights and the reflections in the water. From 1970, induced by Henry Moore, he began to make large sculptures. During his last years he leaned more and more towards making clay sculptures.

On September 14, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1984 the city of Frankfurt am Main awarded him the Max Beckmann Prize, and in 1986 he was awarded the US Congressional Medal of Arts.

He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in the 1980s and a court declared him incapable of administering his estate, for which reason he remained under the guardianship of his daughter since 1989. As the style of his latest works was very different, the price of the ancient skyrocketed; at Sotheby's auctions Pink Lady (1944) fetched $3.6 million in 1987 and Interchanged (1955, also called Interchange) 20.6 million in 1989 (the latter was acquired by the Japanese collector Shigeki Kameyama). His wife Elaine died of lung cancer at the age of seventy, in 1989. On March 19, 1997, he died in his home-studio Long Island, a place that reminded him of the light of his native Holland.

There has been much debate about the relevance and meaning of his later paintings, which became clear, almost graphic, yet still alluded to the biomorphic lines of his earlier works. Some say that his state of mind and attempts to recover from a life of alcoholism had rendered him incapable of consummating the mastery that his early works pointed to, while others see in his later works the precedent of the 1990s painters of clean lines, and with a direct relationship with contemporary artists such as Brice Marden. Others who knew de Kooning personally point out that his last paintings were taken from him and sold before he could finish them.

After his death

Willem de Kooning had the unprecedented opportunity to be the best valued painter in life. He radically transformed American art after World War II and helped create New York as the epicenter of the artistic avant-garde of the 20th century .

Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan wrote the first biography of the artist, de Kooning: An American Master, for which the couple received the Pulitzer Prize for biography; the book was published by Knopf in late 2004.

Willem de Kooning has inspired the Welsh band Manic Street Preachers three songs: Interiors (Song for Willem de Kooning), His Last Painting (about his battle with the Alzheimer's), and the song Door to the River (which takes its title from a painting).

In the 2000 feature Pollock was played by Val Kilmer.

The price of his works, meanwhile, has continued to rise. The record is currently held by Interchanged (1955), for which the American fund manager Kenneth Griffin paid some 300 million dollars in February 2016. The tycoon has given the Art Institute of Chicago to be exhibited both this painting and Number 17A by Jackson Pollock, also an abstract expressionist, acquired on the same occasion for around 200 million.