Willem de Kooning is one of the most important artists of the
twentieth century, a true "painter's painter" whose protean work
continues to inspire many artists. In the thirties and forties,
along with Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, he became a key
figure in the revolutionary American movement of abstract
expressionism. Of all the painters in that group, he worked the
longest and was the most prolific, creating powerful, startling
images well into the 1980s.
The first major biography of de Kooning captures both the life and
work of this complex, romantic figure in American culture. Ten
years in the making, and based on previously unseen letters and
documents as well as on hundreds of interviews, this is a fresh,
richly detailed, and masterful portrait. The young de Kooning
overcame an unstable, impoverished, and often violent early family
life to enter the Academie in Rotterdam, where he learned both
classic art and guild techniques. Arriving in New York as a
stowaway from Holland in 1926, he underwent a long struggle to
become a painter and an American, developing a passionate
friendship with his fellow immigrant Arshile Gorky, who was both a
mentor and an inspiration. During the Depression, de Kooning
emerged as a central figure in the bohemian world of downtown New
York, surviving by doing commercial work and painting murals for
the WPA. His first show at the Egan Gallery in 1948 was a
revelation. Soon, the critics Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess were
championing his work, and de Kooning took his place as the
charismatic leader of the New York school--just as American art
began to dominate the international scene.
Dashingly handsome and treated like a movie star on the streets of
downtown New York, de Kooning had a tumultuous marriage to Elaine
de Kooning, herself a fascinating character of the period. At the
height of his fame, he spent his days painting powerful
abstractions and intense, disturbing pictures of the female
figure--and his nights living on the edge, drinking, womanizing,
and talking at the Cedar bar with such friends as Franz Kline and
Frank O'Hara. By the 1960s, exhausted by the feverish art world, he
retreated to the Springs on Long Island, where he painted an
extraordinary series of lush pastorals. In the 1980s, as he slowly
declined into what was almost certainly Alzheimer's, he created a
vast body of haunting and ethereal late work.
This is an authoritative and brilliant exploration of the art,
life, and world of an American master.
"From the Hardcover edition."
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