Willem De Kooning

Willem De Kooning

Willem De Kooning had been widely acknowledged as one of the greatest

painters of this century known for his daring originality. Several

exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad have celebrated the artistic

achievements of this eminent artist's 60-year career. My essay covers part

of his early life with real focus on his late paintings. His last works,

painted in the 1980s, as he was in deteriorating health have come under

criticism by some critics. Willem de Kooning was born on April 24, 1904 in

Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His father was a beer distributor and his

mother ran a bar. At the age of twelve he became an apprentice at a

commercial design and decorating firm. He studied for eight years at

Rotterdam's leading art school. In 1926, de Kooning secured a passage on a

streamer to the United States, illegally entering and settling in New

Jersey. He quickly moved to Manhattan, painted signs and worked as a

carpenter in New York City. Then in 1935, he landed a job with the Works

Progress Administration, a government agency that put artists to work

during the Great Depression. By the next decade, he had attained a place in

the downtown art scene among his fellow artists.

By the late 1940s, de Kooning along with Arshile Gorky, Jackson

Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, began to be recognized as a major

painter in a movement called "Abstract Expressionism". This new school of

thought shifted the center of twentieth century art form Paris to New York.

Willem de Kooning was recognized as the only painter who had one foot in

Europe and one in America. He combined classical European training in

Holland with a love for popular American culture. The restlessness and

energy of American life was a source of great inspiration and passion for

him. Gary Garrells, the chief curator at the San Fransisco Museum of Modern

Art said, " He had the wildness of Pollock but mixed with the impeccable

craftsmanship of the European tradition. He was not interested in style, he

was interested in the process of looking and knowing and getting under the

skin." Willem de Kooning, 93, was the last survivor of his famous peers.

One would not have predicted for him a great old age. Among the leading

figures of hard-living generation he belonged by temperament and talent to

a romantic tradition of artists who burned the physical and psychic fuel of

themselves with devastating speed and completeness. Few of de Kooning's

closest friends and colleagues survived the harshness of the 1940s and