Willem de Kooning
(1904 - 1997) |
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Art Work
| Name: |
Willem de Kooning |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
Rotterdam, the Netherland |
| Nationality: |
Dutch |
| Birth: |
1904 |
| Death: |
1997 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
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| Medium: |
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| Method: |
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| Style: |
abstract expressionist |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painter
Sculptor
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Biography
Willem de Kooning rewritten Biography from The Yale Dictionary of Art and Artists
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch-American painter, who was born in Rotterdam, Netherlands in 1904. While in Rotterdam, he studied art in evening classes and worked during the day at a commercial art firm, where they created art mainly for advertising for businesses. In 1926 he immigrated to New York and in the mid-1940s he, along with Jackson Pollock, became the creator, or founder, of Abstract Expressionism. This was a movement, which continued into the 1950s, and was characterized by an emphasis that the artist should create his pieces by transferring his emotions and feelings from within himself outwardly onto the canvas.
De Kooning painted a lot of figures, many nudes, which were similar in construction to the figures of Ingres, whose human forms were revealed as the combination of shapes, such as squares, rectangles, and circles. De Kooning took this type of figuration one step further by removing the flowing lines that connected the shapes and smoothed the form, leaving a jarringly sharp and geometric figure. De Kooning then took these modeled forms and continued their creation with an anti-classical eye. Ingres had used a very classical style, so his figures were very large and monumental, with carefully and precisely modeled bodies. One could say almost Herculean in perfection. So, in opposition, de Kooning's figures are imperfect and asymmetrical. De Kooning believed this balance he was maintaining, by using figures modeled after Ingres but displayed in an anti-classical manner, was the product of the abstract process of creation. This type of creative process was defined by Paul Klee and others as a type of correspondence between the marks on the paper and the artist's eye and spirit; as the conversation continues, so does the work.
He was influenced by John Graham and Arshile Gorky, which led his style to become more spontaneous; by 1945 his style was nearing abstraction as his figures were becoming less and less intact, seeming to drift away from their own bodies and shatter in pieces across the canvas. In 1948 he was rewarded with his first solo exhibition. Here he displayed black-on-white and white-on-black paintings which gave the impression of figures, but were seen more for their worth as expressions of highly energized and emotional brushstrokes. As the years have gone by, a stronger emphasis has been placed on the control and precision of his brushstrokes.
In 1953 he shocked his fans when he painted and showed coarse and awkward images of very large women with almost grotesque anatomies. At this point he was branded a traitor by his contemporaries; however, we presently understand that these women were just a blend of his earlier, more defined figures and his later, more expressionistic style. Some say that these shocking figures of the 1950s are humorous and joking, but this admission is rare. Besides these large, poorly received nudes, de Kooning also painted landscapes, which bordered on the abstract. At the end of the 1960s he dabbled in figure sculpting, but painting figures and landscapes remained his main themes. He has been a major leader in American art and has had the privilege of exhibiting internationally as well.
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Samples of Work
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