Willem de Kooning and his painting

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Willem de Kooning was born on 1904-24-04 in Rotterdam (Netherlands). Driven by a sharp insightful mind, a strong work ethic and a dogged self-doubt – combined with a determination to achieve – the charismatic de Kooning became one of the most influential American artists of the 20th century.

Studying and moving to the USA

Showing an interest in art from an early age, Willem was already an apprentice at a leading design firm at the age of 12 and, with her support, entered the night school at the prestigious Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Technology, which was renamed in his honor in 1998, named the Willem de Kooning Academy.

In 1926, with the help of his friend Leo Kogan, he sailed on a ship to the United States and settled in New York. At that moment, he did not aspire to the life of an artist. Rather, like many young Europeans, he had his own version of the American dream (big money, girls, cowboys, etc.). However, after a brief stint as a house painter, he became a professional painter, immersing himself in the arts and the New York art world, befriending such notables as Stuart Davis and Arshile Gorky.

New York School

In 1936, during the Great Depression, de Kooning worked in the Murals Department of the US Public Works Administration. The experience he gained convinced him to devote himself entirely to painting.

By the end of the 50s. de Kooning and his contemporaries in New York, including Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, became famous for their rejection of accepted stylistic norms such as regionalism, surrealism and cubism, dissolving the relationship between foreground and background and using paint to create emotional, abstract gestures. This movement has been called variously - action painting, and abstract expressionism, and simply the New York school.

Prior to this, Paris was considered the center of the avant-garde, and it was difficult for this group of ambitious American artists to compete with the innovative nature of Picasso's work. But de Kooning said bluntly: Picasso is a man who needs to be surpassed. Willem and his team have finally caught the eye - they are responsible for the historic shift in attention to New York in the post-World War II years.

Among his peers, de Kooning became known as "the painter of artists" and then gained recognition in 1948 with his first solo exhibition at the Charles Egan Gallery at the age of 44. There were paintings, heavily processed in oil and enamel, including his famous black and white canvases. This exhibition was important to Kooning's reputation.

Soon after, in 1951In the same year, he made one of his first major sales when he received the Logan Medal and the Art Institute of Chicago prize for his grandiose abstraction, The Excavation (1950). This is perhaps one of the most important paintings of the 20th century. At the same time, de Kooning enlisted the support of two leading New York critics - Clement Greenberg, and then Harold Rosenberg.

Departure from abstraction

Willem de Kooning's success has not weakened his need for research and experimentation. In 1953, he shocked the art world with a series of aggressively drawn figural pieces commonly known as the "Women" paintings. These images were more types or icons than portraits of people.

His return to figures was seen by some as a betrayal of abstract expressionist principles. He lost Greenberg's support, but Rosenberg remained convinced of his importance. The Museum of Modern Art in New York saw Kooning's change in style as an advance in his work, and in 1953 acquired the painting Woman I (1950–1952). What seemed stylistically reactionary to some was clearly avant-garde to others.

Rise to fame in 1948-1953 was only the first act in a remarkable career as an artist. Despite the fact that many of his contemporaries developed their own mature authorial style, de Kooning's inquisitive spirit did not allow such a limitation. Struggling with adherence to any dogma, he continued to explore new styles and methods, often challenging his own. We need to change in order tostay the same,” is one of his oft-quoted remarks.

In the 1954 painting Marilyn Monroe, Willem de Kooning reduced the pop icon to its most recognizable features - a black fly and a wide red mouth.

From drawing to engraving

De Kooning was equally comfortable using both paper and canvas. But the first provided the immediacy of the result that attracted him. From September 1959 to January 1960, the artist remained in Italy, during which time he produced a large number of experimental black-and-white works on paper, known as "Roman drawings". When he returned, he went to the West Coast. In San Francisco, de Kooning worked with brush and ink, but also, more interestingly, experimented with lithography. The two resulting prints (known as Waves I and Waves II) are prime examples of abstract expressionist prints.

Fight directions

By the end of the 1950s, Willem de Kooning moved from women to women landscapes, and then to what seemed to be a return to "pure" abstraction. These works were respectively called "urban", "avenue" and "pastoral" landscapes. A series of landscapes by Willem de Kooning - Police Gazette, Gotham News, Parc Rosenberg, Door to the River, Suburb in Havana, etc. But he never completely left the world of real objects for pure abstraction. In 1960, he said that “today, if you think about it, it is absurd to create an image of a person with paints, since we have this problem - to do or not to do it. But suddenly even moreinaction becomes absurd. Therefore, I am afraid that I will have to follow my desires.” The human figure has asserted itself, now in its more carnal form.

Moving to Long Island

In 1963 de Kooning moved from New York to Springs in East Hampton on Long Island. Manipulating space like a sculptor, he designed and built an airy, light-filled studio and home in a quiet, wooded area where he worked in the 1960s before finally moving there in 1971.

The light and landscape of East Hampton reminded him of his native Holland, and the changing environment was reflected in his work. The colors softened, the figures became more conventional in the body, instead of angry and toothy women, more dancing and alluring girls appeared. He continued to experiment with paints, adding water and safflower oil. This made them slippery and wet, which many found extremely difficult to work with.

Experiments of the 70s

During a short trip to Italy in 1969, after meeting with friend Herzl, Emmanuel de Kooning created 13 small clay figures which were then cast in bronze.

In the early 70's he explored both sculpture and lithography while continuing to paint and pencil. During this period, more graphic elements appear in his paintings. Some were done by simply applying paint without using a more painterly approach. This may have been influenced by Japanese art and design, which he became familiar with during his stay inJapan in the early 1970s. His lithographs seem to reflect Japanese ink and calligraphy influences, conveying a sense of open space that is in turn reflected in some of de Kooning's paintings.

The decade of the 1970s was marked first by experimentation with materials and then by breakthroughs. Through or against creative quest, the late 1970s witnessed a prolific period during which the artist created voluptuous, heavily colored works that are among his most sensuous abstractions.

Serene 80s

Visual wrestling is the marker of much of Willem de Kooning's career. In the last decade, he has been fortunate to dispel some of them. Moving away from the methodology of sanding, painting, layering, scraping, rotating the canvas, and repeatedly indenting to view each change, the reduced and sometimes serene paintings of the 80s can be seen as the ultimate synthesis of curvature and abstraction, painting and drawing, and balance and imbalance.

From year to year during the 1980s, the artist explored new forms of pictorial space, and this is demonstrated by the works of Willem de Kooning with ethereal ribbon-like passages or with consoles through which straight lines can float or abruptly stop and balance on wide open spaces. venues, or crowded, bold, lyrical spaces. Brightly colored, predominantly linear elements are juxtaposed with thinly toned white areas. With his frankWith a tendency to embrace the mundane, de Kooning was free to portray non-intellectual, mundane or humorous characters that are sometimes palpable in his abstract paintings. This again illustrates his insistence on freedom from doctrinaire ideas about what art should be.

This is reflected in the spontaneity and simplicity of the casual titles he gave to several works in the 1980s: "Key and Parade", "Cat Meow" and "Deer and Lampshade". De Kooning has reached a more open and less anxious point in his artistic career.

Recent years

De Kooning painted his last painting in 1991. He died in 1997 at the age of 92 after an unusually long, rich and successful career. De Kooning has never stopped exploring and expanding the possibilities of his craft, leaving a lasting impression on American and international artists and art lovers.

Global recognition

During his lifetime, the artist Willem de Kooning received many honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. His work has been featured in thousands of exhibitions and is in the permanent collections of many of the finest art institutions, including at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Tate Modern in London, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

The painting by Willem de Kooning "Exchange" (1955) at Sotheby's in 1989 wassold for $20.6 million. In the same year, he received the Japan Art Association's Imperial Prize. And in 2006, the painting "Woman III" was purchased for $137.5 million, becoming one of the most expensive paintings in the world.