Who is de kooning

De Kooning's friend Harold Rosenberg described these paintings, calling them "symbolist abstraction dissociated from their sources in nature[;] organic shapes are carriers of emotional charges in the same category as numbers, mathematical signs, letters of the alphabet; the memory of a friend may be aroused by a pair of gloves or a telephone number, an erotic memory by a curved line or an initial. Oil and enamel on paper mounted on composition board - The Art Institute of Chicago.

Even as he returned to figuration in the late s, he embarked on another abstraction, Excavation at the same time. Just over six-and-a-half-feet tall and eight-feet wide, Excavation is not as monumental as some later Abstract Expressionist paintings, but it is the biggest painting de Kooning ever made. The pictorial space de Kooning depicted on the canvas was closely tied to his own embodied sense of space in the physical world.

In a talk he wrote for the Artists' Club, de Kooning explained, "If I stretch my arms next to the rest of myself and wonder where my fingers are - that is all the space I need as a painter. To move beyond this scale one risks losing the human intimacy of the space. The bulk of the surface is covered with dirty white, cream, and yellowish shapes outlined with black and gray lines.

Throughout the canvas, one sees passages of crimson, blue, magenta, gold, and aqua. The effect is an all-over composition with no single point of entry and which draws the viewer's eyes across the entirety of the canvas. No one section stands out a more important or less interesting than another. That being said, one does see something of a ground line at the bottom of the edge of the painting and a rectangle that evokes a door or a window.

Just as the composition seems to expand beyond the edges of the canvas, de Kooning brings the viewer back to a threshold, suggesting a particular place and time, grounding them in the present.

Harold Rosenberg commented on the painting, "For all the protracted agitation that produced it, Excavation was a classical painting, majestic and distant, like a formula wrung out of testing explosives.

If, as de Kooning liked to say, the artist function by 'getting into the canvas' and working his way out again, this masterpiece had seen him not only depart but close the door behind him. The surface of the canvas is covered in thick swathes of energetic, vertical, and horizontal gestures of creamy and silvery hues. From this frantic surface, the figure of a wide-eyed, large-breasted woman emerges. She sports blond hair and a big smile.

The compactness of the figure gives the sense of the body being squeezed or constrained, but at the same time, its gestural quality gives it a sense of wound-up energy. The slight tapering of the figure towards the knees and ankles is reminiscent of prehistoric figurines and Cycladic idols, precedents of the importance of the female form in art to which de Kooning often alluded.

Importantly, de Kooning blends the figure and ground together, making it difficult to discern where one begins and ends, hence the woman both dissolves into and emerges from the background, an effect that de Kooning termed "no-environment. The theme of women was one that de Kooning returned to regularly. Some cited his rocky relationship with his wife, his estranged relationship with his mother, and his penchant for womanizing as the source for the subject.

Some went so far to say that de Kooning must hate women because, in this instance, he used smears of red paint to depict three bullet holes across her chest, but de Kooning responded to the accusation by saying, "I thought it was rubies.

He often spoke of his women as being funny and larger than life, satirizing the shopping denizens of department stores and the fashionable ladies who paraded down Madison Avenue. He may have looked to ancient idols and classical odalisques, but de Kooning was equally intrigued with pin-up girls and movie stars.

He was one of the only Abstract Expressionists to take on such subject matter, and for this reason he became an important touchstone for younger artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, and later Pop Artists.

At the end of the s, de Kooning began to spend more and more time in East Hampton, a place far more rural and quieter than the bustling streets of New York City. In Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point , we see the quintessential bold strokes de Kooning had become known for, but the color palette and arrangement seem unlike what had come before. Curator John Elderfield refers to the new palette as "rococo hues of pink, yellow, and blue" and links it to his recent trip to Italy.

The bright, pastel nature of these colors evokes a brighter landscape and reflections of water. Louse Point was a section of beach not far from where de Kooning was building his new studio, and Rosy-fingered dawn is a reference to Homer's epic The Odyssey. The reference also draws one's attention to the pink forms, which are also reminiscent of de Kooning's various forays with his women figures. While there is no form reminiscent of the figure or of landscape, for that matter, one thinks of de Kooning's quotation, "The landscape is in the Woman and there is Woman in the landscape.

There is a lushness throughout, but parts are heavily impastoed, where de Kooning applied the paint thickly, while other parts are dry and thin where de Kooning pressed newspaper onto the surface to absorb the excess oil.

Elderfield also points out that drips of paint run in multiple directions, suggesting that de Kooning worked on the canvas from multiple vantage points before settling on its final orientation. Such flexibility and open-endedness speaks to de Kooning's spontaneity and his desire to not pin any one form or composition down before it was ready.

It did not take long after de Kooning moved to Springs, East Hampton, that he again took up the figure. While he was still very much interested in pin-ups and pop stars, he also turned his attention to those who lived near him and frequented the beaches. Here, in Woman and Child , we see the pink flesh and breast of a woman whose knees are drawn up and touching each other. Perhaps she is lying on her back with her knees in the air. A goggle-eyed, orange-haired figure, presumably the child of the title, lies next to her, or perhaps the child is sitting.

Of course, though, the title recalls the titles given to traditional depictions of the Virgin Mary and Christ Child, an allusion de Kooning was surely aware of. In a radical gesture, de Kooning makes the heavenly and spiritual fleshy and material. De Kooning distorts the perspective and the figures to such a degree that the space of the painting becomes utterly ambiguous. As in his earliest Women paintings from the s, body parts assume shapes and lives of their own, quite apart from where they are supposed to be.

The increasingly abstract figure will completely dissolve, once again, into large, gestural, all-over abstract compositions in the s. Many decried these paintings as being out of step with the times. Their over-sweet pink and pastel hues, their lush and seemingly excessive gesturalness, and their exuberance contrasted sharply with the coolness of Color Field Painting, Minimalism, and Pop Art of the time.

Some also felt uncomfortable with a man of de Kooning's age engaging in such overt eroticism. Despite these concerns, de Kooning was at the height of his fame in the s, with collectors and museums alike wanting to acquire his paintings. His lithographs seem to reflect the influence of Japanese ink drawing and calligraphy as many exhibit a newly gained sense of open space, which in turn is also reflected in some of the paintings.

The s decade was marked first by material experimentation and then by breakthrough. Because of or in spite of the explorations, the late s were a prolific period in which he produced voluptuous, thickly painted works which are among his most sensually abstract.

He was fortunate in his final decade to dispel some of the angst. Year after year throughout the s, de Kooning explored new forms of pictorial space as revealed by works with ethereal ribbon-like passages; or some with cantilevers whereby straight lines may float or abruptly stop and balance against broad open areas; or others of crammed, bold, lyrical spaces.

Vividly colored, predominately linear elements were juxtaposed against subtly toned white areas. This again exemplifies his insistence on freedom from doctrinaire ideas of what art should be. De Kooning had reached a more thoroughly open, less anxiously complex place in his artistic career. Succumbing to the affects of old age and dementia, de Kooning worked on his last painting in and passed away in at the age of 92, after an extraordinarily long, rich and successful career.

De Kooning never stopped exploring and expanding the possibilities of his craft, leaving an indelible mark on American and international artists and viewers.

De Kooning was awarded many honors in his lifetime, including The Presidential Medal of Freedom in This is a statement that de Kooning evidently repeated often in the late thirties and forties.

The interview was recorded in March , for BBC. The Willem de Kooning Foundation. Hess' article "de Kooning Paints a Picture," in which he described the process of the picture's creation as a voyage that involved hundreds of revisions, several abandonments and restarts, and was only completed minutes before the work was loaded onto the truck to go to the gallery.

Woman I was purchased from the Janis Gallery show by MoMA, which confirmed its importance in the eyes of many critics, yet the whole series of Women paintings became a controversial talking point for many other reasons.

De Kooning's show had made him a leader of a new generation of painters, who seemed interested in suppressing narrative content and figuration in their paintings.

Now de Kooning had reintroduced the figure, and some commentators - prominent critic Clement Greenberg included - felt it was a step backward. While many saw de Kooning's figuration as an abrupt reversal, de Kooning always painted both figuratively and abstractly at the same time, and he dismissed these criticisms of returning to the figure.

When asked about the controversy in by art critic David Sylvester, de Kooning replied, "In a way, if you pick up some paint with your brush and make somebody's nose with it, this is rather ridiculous when you think of it, theoretically or philosophically. It's really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint today, when you think about it, since we have this problem of doing or not doing it.

But then all of a sudden it was even more absurd not to do it. So I fear that I'll have to follow my desires. De Kooning's pictures were also controversial due to the expressive distortion of the figures and earned him the reputation for being a misogynist. Contrarian critic Emily Genauer wrote in Newsday in , "[de Kooning] flays [the women], beats them, stretches them on racks, draws and quarters them It isn't the contempt in de Kooning's works that I mind, per se.

It's the absence of wholeness and diversity in a great talent who seems to have chained himself to a leering, lynx-eyed totem pole. De Kooning explained to one interviewer, "In a way I feel that the Women of the '50s were a failure.

I see the horror in them now, but I didn't mean it then. I wanted them to be funny and not look so sad and downtrodden like the women in the paintings in the '30s so I made them satiric and monstrous, like sibyls. One of the most erudite among the New York School, de Kooning was steeped in art history, and he regarded Ingres's Odalisque as one of the major antecedents for the series; however he was also cautious about tracing the series' genealogy, saying "I don't paint with ideas of art in mind.

I see something that excites me. It becomes my content. De Kooning was a member of the Eighth Street Artists' Club, which met weekly to discuss art and ideas, and he also became a hard-drinking fixture at the Cedar Tavern. He had a very close working relationship with Franz Kline and was certainly the most powerful influence on the painter.

He was less close to Jackson Pollock , though he admired him greatly and admitted to being jealous of his talent. He felt that Pollock possessed Michelangelo's terribilita , an ability to produce art of a sublime and awe-inspiring beauty. He once recalled, "a couple of times [Pollock] told me 'you know more, but I feel more. Despite the controversies of the early s, de Kooning's reputation continued to grow throughout the decade, and by the end of it, he found himself financially stable for the first time, buying land to build a studio in Springs, the small hamlet in East Hampton, where Jackson Pollock had lived and where other artists had flocked.

Thomas Hess described the settings for de Kooning's Women as "no-environment," indicating their ambiguous space, and his larger abstractions from mids seemed part and parcel of the gritty urban environment in which de Kooning lived.

By the late s, however, he was beginning to show interest in a new type of scenery. He began a series of Abstract Parkway Landscapes , which were based on the landscape as seen from a moving car, and the Abstract Pastoral Landscapes , explored his new environs in a more rural setting close to the water. His personal life became correspondingly more settled. In , he finally became an American citizen, after living in the U. De Kooning's interests were moving away from the city, but they were not necessarily becoming any less radical.

He had always looked to the Old Masters more than most of his peers, and even his Women series retained roots in traditional portraiture. His landscapes may have suggested tradition, yet they too were highly abstract and sometimes only referred to their inspiration in the title.