DE KOONING

Häftad bok. Abbeville Press. 2020. 128 sidor.

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Willem de Kooning is the old master of Abstract Expressionism, whose ferocious women and seemingly spontaneous brushwork have been primary influences on American and European artists of the post-war era. Still fervently painting at age 79, he continues to produce canvases of piercing beauty, which serve as a brilliant finale to this book on one of the great masters of contemporary art.

"Willem de Kooning is always pushing us around, making us change our minds just when we think we finally have his art figured out. As the most venerated, yet still misunderstood and upbraided exponent of Abstract Expressionism, he continues to put stringent demands on himself as an artist and on his audience, not merely as viewers, but as participants in his creative act. In a 1958 interview with Thomas B. Hess, the highly perceptive critic, editor, and champion of de Koonings work, the artist remarked: "I was reading Kierkegaard and I came across the phrase To be purified is to will one thing. It made me sick." Constantly seeking visual predicaments, de Kooning complicates them still further, thereby affirming as an ethical decision the refusal to accept any one approach as the only possible solution--even for his own art.
• Born in Holland in 1904--his surname in Dutch literally means "the king"--de Kooning had an early education that was both practical and academic, a duality that has characterized his career ever since. As a teenager he was apprenticed to a commercial art and decorating firm, yet he also spent eight years at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques. By the time he sailed for the United States in 1926, he had matured as a skilled craftsman and was developing as an eclectic intellectual.
• Expecting to find no art in America, he came here "feeling that this was where an individual could get places and become well off, if he worked hard; while art, naturally, was in Europe." Working first as a house painter in Hoboken, New Jersey, he soon learned that America had artists too. "There was Greenwich Village; there was a whole tradition in painting and in poetry." Indigenous to that tradition was artists poverty. Even though he worked for the Federal Arts Project in 1935 and won a commission to design a mural for the Hall of Pharmacy at the 1939 Worlds Fair, poverty was a persistent threat. Among other odd jobs, he designed window displays for A. S. Beck Shoe Stores. He also painted features and clothing on flat, planklike mannequins, finishing them quite rapidly--a dozen or two in a day. An early friend, the photographer Rudolph Burckhardt, recalls that de Kooning turned down a $100-per-week commercial art job in Philadelphia. "He said hed rather be poor in New York than rich in Philadelphia." …

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