DE KOONING, Willem

(b. 24 April 1904 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands; d. 19 March 1997 in East Hampton, Long Island, New York), monumental figure of the abstract expressionist movement in art, which had worldwide influence and changed painting at the middle of the twentieth century.

Willem de Kooning was the youngest child of Leendert de Kooning, a wine and beverage distributor, and Cornelia Nobel, who owned a seaman's bar. When his parents divorced, his mother gained custody of his older sister, Maria; he was awarded to his father, but his mother appealed, and the young de Kooning went to live with her.

At the age of twelve de Kooning was apprenticed to a commercial art and decorating firm, where he worked for four years. Encouraged by its owners, he attended night classes at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Art and Techniques for eight years. The academic training in the Dutch art school taught him a respect for tradition and craft that stayed with him his entire life. He learned designing, carpentry, portrait painting, and sign painting, skills that enabled him to find work wherever he went.

With a friend, in 1926 de Kooning stowed aboard the SS Shelly, working in the engine room and landing on the east coast of the United States, where he made his way to Hoboken, New Jersey. In 1927 he moved to New York City, where he did commercial art jobs and met other artists, including Stuart Davis, David Smith, Arshile Gorky, and Mark Rothko. Among the lofts and studios in and around Greenwich Village, the charismatic de Kooning became the leader whose abstract painting style the other artists strove to emulate.

In December 1943 de Kooning married Elaine Fried, an artist who was also a writer on art. They had an unconventional marriage but were together off and on until Elaine's death in 1989. They had no children, but in 1956 de Kooning fathered a daughter, Lisa, with Joan Ward, an artist with whom he was living at the time.

After his first one-man exhibit at the Charles Egan Gallery in 1948, de Kooning's reputation was established when the art critic Clement Greenberg called him one of the four or five most important painters in the country. He was invited to exhibit at the 1950 and 1954 Venice Biennales, among other major international shows.

His early paintings were essentially abstracted figurative works in shades of soft pink, gray, and green. The subject matter was the male figure. In the late 1940s he explored black-and-white motifs in mixed media and torn paper collage painted in a frenzy of shapes that covered the entire format.

During the 1950s de Kooning began his "Woman" series, perhaps the paintings for which he is most widely known. The visual onslaught of American advertising, which expressed the postwar economic boom in print, billboards, and television, was his springboard for these ferocious, slashing, grinning, big-breasted, sensual, bug-eyed monuments to abstract expressionism. This series is de Kooning's signature work, much as his friend Jackson Pollock's drip paintings and Franz Kline's black-and-white abstractions are theirs.

On 13 March 1961 de Kooning became a United States citizen, and soon after he purchased some land near East Hampton, Long Island, in a locale known as the Springs. He lived in a cottage while he worked on the plans for his new studio.

By 1963 de Kooning was living year-round in the Springs and working in his light-filled studio. He had found it difficult to accept his wealth and status before his move to Long Island. He commented, "I have no need to be celebrated, to shake hands with a lot of people. In the end it's just your friends and your work that count." However, the media beyond the art magazines gave him and his work regular coverage.

Once established in the Springs in 1964 and comfortable with the lakes, marshes, and coastline of Long Island, de Kooning declared he was ready to start a new "Woman" series. In the works of this period he painted women in a softer light. As he declared in 1964, "I'm working on a water series. The figures are floating like reflections in the water. The color is influenced by the natural light. That's what's so good here."

Later in the 1960s de Kooning used the landscape of Long Island as a background for his softer, less ferocious women. He declared that images of nature were inside him, and his women lounged on the grass or in the water. He said, "They are brighter girls now, but they are all the same woman." These de Kooning women are playfully sexual, opened up, legs splayed and inviting voyeurism.

In 1967 de Kooning painted a series called "Women on a Sign." These yeasty, fleshy, erotic paintings carry an in-your-face sense of brutality and a life-affirming sense of iconography. He also painted a 1967 "Man" series. Pushing a squatting, comic, grotesque figure of a male around on the canvas, he painted his subject without the geometric structure of cubism or any recognizable features. A similar style appeared later in his sculptures of the 1970s.

The sexual revolution of the 1960s, with its relaxed social mores and laws regarding obscenity and pornography, affected all areas of pop culture and the arts. The viewer contemplating de Kooning's life-size fleshy figures is initiated into a deliberate erotic engagement. In his later series of 1967, "Women Singing," de Kooning painted women from the media—fashion models, young, thin, and long-legged.

By the end of the 1960s de Kooning was traveling in Europe and Japan and having exhibitions in major museums around the world. He continued to draw figures in various media and completed a number of small bronze sculptures. Honors and awards continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s; prices for his paintings escalated. In 1989 a record price, $20.8 million, was paid for a 1955 painting at a Sotheby's auction.

During the 1980s de Kooning moved away from painting figures and instead painted flat fields of white with ribbons of red, blue, and orange that danced and twisted across the canvas. Critics wondered whether his work was affected by his mental decline from Alzheimer's disease.

On 1 February 1989 Elaine de Kooning died. Ten days later de Kooning's daughter, Lisa de Kooning Villeneuve, and John Eastman filed for appointment as conservators of de Kooning's property on the grounds of his mental decline.

The last titan of the abstract expressionists died at his home at the age of ninety-three. He is buried in Green River Cemetery in East Hampton.

Biographies include three entitled Willem de Kooning, by Thomas B. Hess (1959), Harry F. Gaugh (1983), and Diane Waldman (1988); Judith Zilczer et al., Willem de Kooning from the Hirshhorn Museum Collection (1993); and Edvard Lieber, Willem de Kooning: Reflections in the Studio (2000). Obituaries are in the New York Times and Times (London) (both 20 Mar. 1997).

Rosemarie S. Cardoso