Willem de Kooning 1904 —1997

When asked about his Women Paintings

Willem de Kooning said:

"Maybe... I was painting the woman in me….

Women irritate me sometimes. I painted that irritation in the Woman series. That's all."

Willem de Kooning was born April 24, 1904, in Rotterdam. From 1916 to 1925, he studied at night at the Academie van Beeldende Kunsten en Technische Wetenschappen, Rotterdam, while apprenticed to a commercial-art and decorating firm and later working for an art director. In 1924, he visited museums in Belgium and studied further in Brussels and Antwerp. De Kooning came to the United States in 1926 and settled briefly in Hoboken, New Jersey. He worked as a house painter before moving to New York in 1927, where he met Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, and John Graham. He took various commercial-art and odd jobs until 1935–36, when he was employed in the mural and easel divisions of the WPA Federal Art Project. Thereafter he painted full-time. In the late 1930s, his abstract as well as figurative work was primarily influenced by the Cubism and Surrealism of Pablo Picasso and also by Gorky, with whom he shared a studio.

 In 1938, de Kooning started his first series of Women, which would become a major recurrent theme. During the 1940s, he participated in group shows with other artists who would form the New York School and become known as Abstract Expressionists. De Kooning’s first solo show, which took place at the Egan Gallery, New York, in 1948, established his reputation as a major artist; it included a number of the allover black-and-white abstractions he had initiated in 1946. The Women of the early 1950s were followed by abstract urban landscapes, Parkways, rural landscapes, and, in the 1960s, a new group of Women.

 De Kooning used a variety of tricks to pump up the sensuously inviting tactility of his surfaces, including his famous wet-on-wet technique of mixing salad oil in the pigment, in order to make it slithery, fluid and receptive to sustained periods of work.  It didn't dry out fast.  As he worked he would repeatedly scrape down the surface, leaving layered smears and traces of under paint to show through, like insistent memories of past encounters piling up one on top of  the other.  His paintings can look slatternly, as if they've been around.  He rarely painted either males or reclining figures.

 Great artists have collided with mortality throughout history, but none has done it in quite the way that De Kooning has.  His last paintings were those made between 1981 and 1990; then he laid down his brushes for good and became an invalid tended around the clock.  He died on Wednesday, March 19, 1997.

WILLEM DE KOONING’S FIRST SCULPTURES

 In 1968, de Kooning visited the Netherlands for the first time since 1926, for the opening of his retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. In Rome in 1969, he executed his first sculptures—figures modeled in clay and later cast in bronze—and in 1970–71 he began a series of life-size figures. In 1974, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, organized a show of de Kooning’s drawings and sculpture that traveled throughout the United States and in 1978 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, mounted an exhibition of his recent work. In 1979, de Kooning and Eduardo Chillida received the Andrew W. Mellon Prize, which was accompanied by an exhibition at the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh. De Kooning settled in the Springs, East Hampton, Long Island, in 1963. He was honored with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1997. The artist died March 19, 1997, in East Hampton, New York. 

Between 1950 and the first part of 1955 De Kooning spent most of his time painting and drawing women torsos with their female features exaggerated (large breasts and hips). Many pencil and pastel drawings were made. On canvas he started working on Woman I in 1950 and kept changing the image till he was ultimately satisfied in 1952. When you compare the final result with the in between phases, you can say that the end stage is indeed the strongest and that De Kooning's habit of analysing and changing is effective.
In 1953 the Woman I-VI series and the pastels were exhibited at the Sydney Janis gallery as paintings on the theme of women. In these paintings the staight brush strokes are dominant with much variaty in the use of colours. The expressive power and audacity of the series had a smashing impact. Specifically the much reproduced Woman I with her agressive look made De Kooning an international celebrity. In 1983 Two women (1955) was sold for $ 1.210.000, a record for a living and still productive artist. Today De Kooning's top works can do ten times as much.

 During 1955 De Koonings paintings became abstract again. Woman as a landscape is often mentioned as a intermediary painting, but you might as well say that the 1955 abstract paintings are derived from the way De Kooning handled his background in Woman I-VI. The paintings from 1955 and and 1956 are multicoloured. The ones made between 1957 and 1963 show a reduced colour palette, varying per painting, and broad lines, brought onto the canvas with big housepainting brushes. Grease on 8th avenue, Montauk highway and Suburb in Havana are for instance mostly using the colour combination blue, yellow and brown. They all have splash effects, suggesting that the paint was put on canvas with wild gestures. Some people spoke of such paintings as action painting, but in the case of the Kooning the action was slow and contemplative. Directly related to these paintings are the large black and white oil and enemal drawings on paper, that De Kooning made during his visit of Rome in 1959.

The abstract paintings from this period have been called urban landscapes, because many titles refer to urban places and infrastructures. In 1961 he made a less known second series of smaller woman paintings on paper. Because of his fame De Kooning felt less and less at ease in New York and started spending time on Long Island. In 1962 he himself designed a new large atelier, that was build in 1963 in East Hampton. In Pastorale and the majestic Rosy-fingered Dawn at Louse Point from 1963, two of the last works made in Manhattan, he's mainly using the colour combination pink, white and yellow. With these titles De Kooning is referring to the brightness of the countryside at sunrise.

 In 1964 De Kooning moved permanently to his new atelier in East Hampton. Here he changed his style overnight. Gone were the large straight moves from the urban landscapes and new were the curly smaller light coloured brush strokes. In fact the straight lines would never return. Back was the human figure as subject, mostly women standing or sitting. With virtually no transition paintings, it looks as if De Kooning started anew. For the body of the figures De Kooning often used a flesh colourod mix of pink and beige.
He became more free in his way of finishing paintings. Apart from larger canvasses as The visit (1967, DW 124) and Two figures in a landscape (1967, SM2 35), also many smaller sketch like paintings on paper reached the market. He also started working on imprints of his paintings on newspaper and vellum.

From 1969 onwards, with for instance The sun, the sea, the wind (SM2 36), several abstract paintings were produced along with the figures. In this year De Kooning for the first time started working on bronze sculpture. In 1973-4 he took a break from painting and made some larger sculptures, after which he closed the sculpture cycle.

The sculptures have a curious history. It was not until he was 65 years old, happened to be staying in Rome and was under pressure by someone who had bought a small foundry that de Kooning began to make sculptures. Quite possibly he would never have begun at all had this combination of circumstances not come about in 1969.  In all, the catalogue raisonné lists 33 sculptures of Willem de Kooning's. 

NY TIMES ART CRITIC JOHN RUSSELL IN HIS REVIEW:  MAY 20, 1983  WROTE OF THE SCULPTURE OF WILLEM DE KOONING AT XAVIER FFOURCADE GALLERY AND THE INSTALLATION IN FRONT OF THE SEAGRAM BUILDING:

There is also much of that delight in the antic element in human behavior that comes out so strongly in many of de Kooning's paintings and drawings. When, for instance, he modeled a human figure lying down it looked like two banana skins that were still on the stalk and yet was perfectly recognizable as a particular kind of person.

Other tiny pieces made at that time turned out to incorporate the sexy crouch, the feet splayed in an unnamed dance and the frenetic oddities of posture that had long been the mark of de Kooning. He himself was in no great hurry to have them cast, but when they came back from the foundry they turned out to have a highly energized life of their own. Trying a New Medium

They did not, on the other hand, look like the work of a natural sculptor, or like the work of an artist for whom the third dimension was a matter of life and death. They looked like the work of a major artist whose idiom carried over rather well into a medium that he had just happened to try. In particular, the sculptures brought to new and vivid life the kind of hectic scramble that had achieved such wonderful results in both drawing and painting.

Larger pieces came later - above all the ''Clamdigger'' of 1972 and the ''Hostess'' of 1973 - both of which have by now achieved archetypal status. Not only does the hostess have just the fruity and caricatural vivacity for which the subject calls, but the clamdigger comes across as part man, part creature of the mud and the shallows. Yet when we look at these sculptures, we do not feel that an indispensable language is being reinvented, but rather that sculpture is being used by someone whose eye for human behavior is quite fiendishly sharp.

Furthermore, and although they are distinctly and unmistakably by de Kooning, they are not by the whole of de Kooning. To see what this means, take a look at the batch of paintings dated 1977 that also forms part of the show. Though not major works, they have about them a look of rightness and inevitability that never quite attaches to the sculptures.

The paintings come, in other words, from the very center of de Kooning. Nothing of anyone else enters into them. But when the sculptures are enlarged, as is now beginning to be the case, echoes are sounded. De Kooning may never have thought about Henry Moore, or about Boccioni, when he was modeling the ''Seated Woman'' that makes such an effect outside the Seagram Building. But both Moore and Boccioni come to mind when we look at that sculpture, just as certain drawings of Dubuffet come to mind when we look at some of the larger and wilder upright figures at the Fourcade Gallery. Sometimes, too, there could be something of Francis Bacon in the working and reworking of the human figure. This is not a matter of ''influence'' but of presences that are in the air all around us.

In 1975 De Kooning was painting again with new vigour, producing series of untitled abstract paintings. Stylistically they were a continuation upon the abstracts made between 1969 and 1972, multicoloured and with curly lines. He now choose for larger quadrangular canvasses as his standard format. Four titles refer to the vicinity of the sea in East Hampton, namely Whose name was writ in water ..., Water, soft banks and a window, Screams of children come from seagulls and The North Atlantic light. De Kooning's preference for light colours remained. He himself described the light curly strokes as watery.
1975-1977 were happy years, De Kooning felt like he was painting as if he couldn't miss. Between 1978 and 1980 he considered the series a finished cycle and painted little. The canvasses from these three years show him looking for new directions. By this time his drinking habit reached a maximum and people started fearing for his life. His wife Elaine, from whom he lived seperately since 1955, was willing to move in again on condition that he stopped using alcohol, which he did. In 1981 the couple was reunited.

In 1981 De Kooning's productivity was rising. Again he came with a new stylistic direction, but he remained abstract. All paintings of the eighties were made on canvasses that were whitened first. The big gestures on the 1981 paintings were becoming ever more thinner at the end of 1982. Between 1983-86 his style became drawing like, with a preference for primary colours. During these years De Kooning painted with an unprecedented pace averaging a painting a week. Though he kept making paintings that are great, the downside of this particular productivity was that the average quality declined and the paintings were becoming alike.

In 1987 pastel colours were added to the palet and the lines on the paintings were getting thicker, till in 1988 much of the surface was coloured, reaching a fresh approach.

An important source for modern and contemporary American & European Art in East Hampton, New York & worldwide, Vered Gallery's spectacular wide-ranging inventory consists of unique paintings, drawings, large & small scale sculpture, monotypes, prints and photographs  by Ansel Adams, Milton Avery, Richard Avedon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden, Fernando Botero, Cartier-Bresson, Marc Chagall, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Willem De Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, David Hockney, Winslow Homer, Wolf Kahn, Jeff Koons, Fernand Leger, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Thomas Moran, Henry Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Cindy Sherman, Charles Sheeler, Bert Stern, Alfred Stieglitz, Andy Warhol, Carleton E Watkins, Tom Wesselmann and Andrew Wyeth.

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