Search results
Mar 19, 1997 · His paintings of women feature a unique blend of gestural abstraction and figuration. Heavily influenced by the Cubism of Picasso, de Kooning became a master at ambiguously blending figure and ground in his pictures while dismembering, re-assembling, and distorting his figures in the process.
De Kooning began painting in his free time, and in 1928 he joined the art colony at Woodstock, New York. He also began to meet some of the modernist artists active in Manhattan. Among them were the American Stuart Davis, the Armenian Arshile Gorky and the Russian John Graham, whom de Kooning collectively called the "Three Musketeers".
Willem de Kooning (; Dutch: [ˈʋɪləm də ˈkoːnɪŋ]; April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. Born in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, he moved to the United States in 1926, becoming a US citizen in 1962.
Willem de Kooning (/ˈwɪləm də ˈkuːnɪŋ/; Dutch: [ˈʋɪləm də ˈkoːnɪŋ]; April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was a Dutch abstract expressionist artist. He was born in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. He moved to the United States in 1926, and became an American citizen in 1962.
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.
The picture in question was Willem de Kooning’s Woman, I (1950–52). Though it was one of a series of six oil-on-canvas paintings centered upon a single female figure that de Kooning had worked on from 1950 to 1953, Woman, I received the most attention.
Between 1946 and 1949, de Kooning produced a series of highly abstract black-and-white-paintings that culminated in Attic, in which angular, thrusting forms collide with organic, curvilinear ones to yield a high-pitched, expressive picture.
