Williem de Kooning
 Williem de Kooning (1904-1997) is widely considered to be one of the greatest Abstract Expressionist painters of the post-WWII period, his dominance rivaled only by Jackson Pollock. Remembered for his large canvases as well as controversial melding of both abstract and figurative imagery, de Kooning lived much longer than his contemporaries. The group of painters that would be identified as the New York School was made up of de Kooning, Arshile Gorky and Edgar Denby as well as others.
Although his works appear to be spontaneous, de Kooning often spent many months on a single piece, repeatedly painting over completed sections and occasionally pressing newspaper onto the dry canvas. Friend and New Yorker critic Harold Rosenberg first used the term action painting to refer to de Kooning’s violent slashes of color and the shifting foreground and background typical of his abstract work. “Painting isn’t just the visual thing that reaches your retina,” de Kooning said, “it’s what’s behind it. I’m not interested in ‘abstracting’ or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more and more things in—drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or an idea. It doesn’t matter if it’s different from mine as long as it comes from the painting which has its own integrity and intensity.”
Williem de Kooning was born on April 24, 1904 in Rotterdam, Holland. De Kooning’s parents separated when he was five, and after a brief period in which he lived with his father whom he was very close, his mother demanded that he live with her. The painters artist talents were evident even in childhood, and at age 12 he left school to apprentice with Jan and Jaap Giding, the proprietors of a large commercial art firm. When de Kooning had completed his training in traditional arts and crafts, the Gidings assisted in enrolling him in the Academie Voor Beeldende Kunsten en Technische Wetenschapen, where he attended evening classes for the next eight years (1916-1924). De Kooning graduated from the Academy in 1924, having received certification as both an artist and craftsmen. As a young man, de Kooning became familiar with the work of Walt Whitman, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Piet Mondrian. He also admired a group of Dutch abstract artists known as DeStijl, who counted Theo Van Doesburg and Mondrian among their ranks and whose work he first encountered while working for the art director of a Rottedam department store from 1920-1923.
De Kooning left for the US in 1926 (he did not become a citizen until 1961) in hope of becoming a commercial illustrator. Despite his complete unfamiliarity with English language or American culture, he was able to find free lance work. He moved to an area of New Jersey with sizable Dutch population, only to move to New York the following year. There he developed friendships with artists including Edward Denby, Stuart Davis, and Arshile Gorky. He shared a studio with Gorky who, along with Picasso, came to be a major influence on the painter’s early work. In 1935, de Kooning found full time work with the WPA Federal Art Project, and in 1939 was commissioned by the New York World’s Fair to create a mural for the Hall of Pharmacy.
In 1942, de Kooning met the painter Jackson Pollock, with whom he formed a club, an artists’ group that met primarily at 39 East 8th Street. Many of the Abstract Expressionists also gathered at the Cedar Bar, where they socialized with artists and intellectuals such as poet and art critic Frank O’Hara and painters Joan Mitchell and Hans Hofmann. De Kooning married fellow painter Elaine Marie Fried in December of 1942. Over the years, he and his wife often lived in separate homes for extended periods of time, but as he grew older, Elaine spent more time at his house in East Hampton, Long Island. Elaine de Kooning was a respected Abstract Expressionist artist and critic.
The 1940’s were years of great success for W. de Kooning. It was marked by the abstract black and white oil paintings, considered to be some of de Koonings fine work, his first one man show, much critical success, international recognition and his Woman series which moved towards figural representations—an approach which was rejected by most others in his school.
De Kooning’s later work focused on an extended examination of color and light, and he produced many untitled works featuring women and marine animals. By the 1980’s, a decade in which he completed over 300 pieces, his work took on a simpler form, emphasizing abstract orange, blue and red lines that leapt from a canvas painted white. In this later work, de Kooning turned away from the influence of Picasso and began to look more toward the colorful silhouettes of late Matisse.
Although he had been a heavy drinker in his earlier life, he abstained in later life. As he aged, the artist suffered from short term memory loss associated with Alzheimer’s, but fortunately the disease did not affect his technical ability. Of that generation of painters, he was one of the few to survive to old age: Arshile Gorky and Mark Rothko committed suicide in 1948 and 1970, Jackson Pollock died in a car crash in 1956 and Franz Kline succumbed to a heart attack in 1962. De Kooning would not pass away until 1997, after a long battle with Alzheimer's.
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