Willem De Kooning :: Biographies

Willem De Kooning Willem De Kooning had been widely acknowledged as one of the superior jaguars of this century known for his daring originality. Severalexhibitions in the U.S. and abroad induce celebrated the artisticachievements of this eminent artists 60-year career. My essay covers partof his early livelihood with real focus on his late paintings. His last works,painted in the 1980s, as he was in deteriorating health have come nethercriticism by some critics. Willem de Kooning was born on April 24, 1904 inRotterdam, the Netherlands. His preceptor was a beer distributor and hismother ran a bar. At the age of xii he became an apprentice at acommercial design and decorating firm. He studied for eight years atRotterdams leading art school. In 1926, de Kooning secured a passage on astreamer to the United States, illicitly entering and settling in in the altogetherJersey. He quickly move to Manhattan, painted signs and worked as acarpenter in New York City. wherefore in 19 35, he landed a job with the Works hand Administration, a government agency that put artists to workduring the Great Depression. By the next decade, he had attained a place inthe downtown art scene among his fellow artists. By the late 1940s, de Kooning along with Arshile Gorky, capital of MississippiPollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, began to be recognized as a majorpainter in a movement called Abstract Expressionism. This new school of ideal shifted the center of twentieth century art form Paris to New York.Willem de Kooning was recognized as the only painter who had one foot inEurope and one in America. He combined classical European training inHolland with a love for popular American culture. The malaise andenergy of American life was a source of great consumption and passion forhim. Gary Garrells, the chief curator at the San Fransisco Museum of ModernArt said, He had the wildness of Pollock but mixed with the impeccablecraftsmanship of the European tradition. He was not interested in style, hewas interested in the process of looking and knowing and getting under theskin. Willem de Kooning, 93, was the last subsister of his famous peers.One would not have predicted for him a great out of date age. Among the leadingfigures of hard-living generation he belonged by temperament and talent toa romantic tradition of artists who burned the physical and psychic fuel ofthemselves with lay waste to speed and completeness. Few of de Kooningsclosest friends and colleagues survived the harshness of the 1940s and