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Willem de Kooning

1904–1997 · 93 years Tier III

The Rotterdam housepainter who stowed away to become an American painter

Portrait of Willem de Kooning — Antony di Gesu, photographer — 1961 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

De Kooning's parents divorced when he was three, and he left school at twelve to apprentice with a Rotterdam firm of commercial artists, taking evening classes at the Academy of Fine Arts on the side until 1924. Two years later, twenty-two and without a visa, he boarded the British freighter Shelley as a stowaway, officially bound for Argentina, and got off instead at Newport News, Virginia, on August 15, 1926. He spoke almost no English. For the next several years he made his living as a house painter and carpenter, painting seriously only in the hours around it, until an art colony at Woodstock in 1928 gave him his first real community of working artists.

By the late 1940s de Kooning had traded commercial lettering for the loaded, slashing brushwork that made him, with Jackson Pollock, the public face of Abstract Expressionism. Then, starting in 1950, he spent nearly three years on a single motif that scandalized the art world that had just embraced him: Woman I, a grinning, wide-eyed female figure built from violent slashes of paint, followed by five more Woman canvases through 1953. Critics who had celebrated pure abstraction called it a betrayal, a return to the figure at the exact moment figuration was supposed to be finished. De Kooning ignored the argument and kept working, moving through pastoral abstractions in the 1960s into gestural late paintings. His 1955 canvas Interchange sold for roughly 300 million dollars in 2015, briefly the most expensive painting ever sold.

The marriage that anchored his public image was not what it looked like from outside. He married the painter Elaine Fried in December 1943, and both drank hard and treated fidelity as optional; in 1956 he had a daughter, Lisa, with another woman, Joan Ward, while still married to Elaine, and around the same time took up with Ruth Kligman, who had survived the car crash that killed Jackson Pollock months earlier. The drinking was not incidental to the work — it ran alongside every phase of it — and by 1957 he and Elaine had separated outright, spending nearly two decades apart while never divorcing. They reconciled in 1976, when her own drinking had nearly killed her, and stayed together until she died in 1989.

Memory loss set in during the late 1980s, and by most accounts he was already living with Alzheimer's disease while still painting, guided partly by assistants who prepared his canvases and colors. He made his last paintings in 1991 and died at his home in East Hampton on March 19, 1997, at ninety-two. The market settled his standing before the historians finished arguing about it: Interchange, Woman III and other canvases now sell for hundreds of millions of dollars, and his East Hampton studio is preserved much as he left it. The Woman paintings that scandalized critics in 1953 hang today in the Museum of Modern Art, no longer an argument, just the record.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Willem de Kooning's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Excavation artwork
Now at the Art Institute of Chicago 1950
Woman I artwork
The painting that scandalized critics who had just embraced pure abstraction 1952
Interchange artwork
Sold for roughly 300 million dollars in a private sale in 2015 1955
...Whose Name Was Writ in Water artwork
A late pastoral abstraction from his East Hampton years 1975

Life in brief

with age at each point

1907 aged ~3 His parents divorce
1916 aged ~12 Leaves school to apprentice with a commercial art firm
August 15, 1926 aged 22 Lands at Newport News, Virginia, as a stowaway
December 9, 1943 aged 39 Marries the painter Elaine Fried
1950 aged ~46 Begins the Woman series
1957 aged ~53 Separates from Elaine They did not divorce, and reconciled in 1976.
March 13, 1962 aged 57 Becomes a U.S. citizen
March 19, 1997 aged 92 Dies in East Hampton, New York