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Born in Rotterdam, Holland, Willem de Kooning left school at sixteen and apprenticed with a firm of commercial artists and decorators. In 1926, he moved to New York, where his first job was as a house painter.
1948 . April 12 – May 12. First one-man exhibition, “de Kooning,” Charles Egan Gallery, New York (held over through June); resulted in his first New York press review, written by Renée Arb in ARTnews, and a favorable review by Clement Greenberg in The Nation.
After years of cajoling, in 1966 Willem de Kooning agreed to a retrospective of his work. He had resisted for many years, telling one reporter, ‘They treat an artist like a sausage, tie him up at both ends, and stamp on the center “Museum of Modern Art”, as if you’re dead and they own you’.1 De Kooning’s vivid description exposes a fear and anxiety about the canonisation of artists ...
The Foundation fosters the study and appreciation of Willem de Kooning's life and work through research, exhibitions, and educational programs.
Willem de Kooning was a renowned American-Dutch painter that helped form the Abstract Expressionist movement.His gestural works—which were loosely based on figures, landscapes, and still lifes—helped establish a distinctly American style of painting.
A representative of American Abstract Expressionism, Willem de Kooning blurred the boundaries between abstraction and figuration with his Action Painting, becoming an influential figure on the art scene of the second half of the twentieth century.
Dutch-born painter Willem de Kooning was a leading figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He studied at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques and, inspired by American illustrators, moved to the United States in 1926, working his way across the Atlantic as a seaman with no passport or visa.
