Willem de Kooning: The Complete Story
Willem de Kooning stowed away on a ship to America in 1926, spent two years tearing one painting apart, and ended up behind one of the most expensive canvases ever sold. His road runs from the Rotterdam docks to a 300 million dollar sale.
Here is the real story, from the eight years of Dutch academy training nobody mentions to the late paintings made as his memory failed.
Willem de Kooning at a glance:
1904: born in Rotterdam; apprenticed to a commercial design firm at 12, with night classes at the academy.
1926: stows away to America on a British freighter, without papers or English.
1953: Woman I, two years and hundreds of revisions in the making, detonates at the Janis Gallery.
1963: leaves Manhattan for Springs, Long Island, where the light turns the paintings watery and pastoral.
1997: dies at 92 in the studio house he designed; a 2016 private sale of Interchange reaches about 300 million dollars.
From Rotterdam apprentice to American stowaway
Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam on April 24, 1904. At twelve he was apprenticed to a commercial art and decorating firm, and for eight years he took evening classes at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts.
In August 1926 he hid aboard the British freighter SS Shelley and entered the United States without papers, landing at Newport News, Virginia. He painted houses in Hoboken for nine dollars a day before settling in Manhattan.
The 1948 breakthrough that cost almost nothing
Too poor for good pigments, de Kooning worked in cheap black commercial enamel.
The black-and-white abstractions he showed at the Charles Egan Gallery in April 1948, his first solo exhibition at age 44, made his reputation almost overnight.
The Museum of Modern Art bought one of them, Painting (1948), the following year, his first sale to a museum.
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Woman I nearly ended up in the trash
He started Woman I in June 1950 and scraped it down and repainted it for two years, at one point abandoning the canvas in the hallway.
The art historian Meyer Schapiro visited the studio in 1952 and convinced him the painting deserved to survive. When the Woman series was shown in 1953, critics accused him of betraying abstraction. MoMA bought Woman I anyway.
The myth of the wild brute
Because his paint flies and his women snarl, de Kooning is often cast as an untrained savage of the brush. The opposite is true.
He had eight years of rigorous Dutch academic training and could draw like a nineteenth-century master. The slashing style was a choice built on top of skill, not a substitute for it.
He worked from preparatory drawings, sanded layers back down, and mixed his own slow-drying mediums.
Late ribbons, Alzheimer's, and a 300 million dollar canvas
De Kooning struggled with alcoholism for decades.
Through the 1980s his memory declined, and Alzheimer's disease was eventually made public in 1989, yet between 1981 and 1990 he produced hundreds of spare, ribbon-like canvases that many curators defend as a true late style rather than a symptom.
He died in East Hampton on March 19, 1997, at 92. In 2015 his 1955 canvas Interchange sold privately to Kenneth Griffin for about 300 million dollars, then the highest price ever paid for a painting.
Where to see de Kooning
Woman I hangs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Excavation, his largest easel painting, is at the Art Institute of Chicago, where Interchange has also been shown on loan. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam holds a strong group from every decade.
The drawing he agreed to lose
In 1953 the young Robert Rauschenberg knocked and asked for a drawing he could erase. De Kooning understood at once, and made it difficult: he chose a dense sheet of crayon, ink and pencil that took weeks to rub out.
Erased de Kooning Drawing now hangs in San Francisco, a ghost with two authors.
That he said yes is what the brute myth misses. Nobody in New York thought harder about what a drawing was.
The Springs light
In 1963 he left Manhattan for Springs, in the fishermen's end of East Hampton, and built a studio to his own design, ramps and glass like a ship's hull.
The paintings went watery: Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point and other titles straight off the local map, flesh tones dissolving into marsh light.
He biked the lanes and thinned his oils with water and safflower oil until the paint slid like the tide he was looking at.
The sculpture detour
In Rome in 1969 a friend's foundry put clay in his hands, and the painter of slippery figures found a third dimension, sometimes modeling with his eyes closed.
The bronzes that followed, Clamdigger, Seated Woman on a Bench, look squeezed rather than carved: figures pulled from mud and left dripping.
Critics split exactly as they had over the Women. He kept at it for years anyway.
The Willem de Kooning questions that keep coming up
Why is Willem de Kooning famous? He was a leader of Abstract Expressionism in New York, and his Woman series of 1950 to 1953 broke the unwritten rule that serious postwar painting had to be abstract.
How much is a de Kooning worth? Interchange sold privately for about 300 million dollars in 2015, and Woman III fetched 137.5 million in 2006. Even his works on paper trade for six and seven figures.
Did de Kooning have Alzheimer's? Yes. His memory failed through the 1980s and the diagnosis became public in 1989. He kept painting until about 1991, and the status of those late works is still debated.
Was de Kooning self-taught? Not at all. He spent eight years in evening courses at the Rotterdam Academy while apprenticed to a design firm, one of the most complete trainings of any painter of his generation.
What was his relationship with Pollock? Rivals and drinking companions at the Cedar Tavern, with the occasional shove. Each called the other the greatest when it counted.
Who was Elaine? Elaine Fried, painter and critic, married him in 1943. They separated for decades, reunited in 1976, and she spent the 1980s guarding his studio hours. She died in 1989, eight years before him.
More secrets to unlock
From 4,000 dollars to 300 million
De Kooning sold Interchange in 1955 for 4,000 dollars. Sixty years later the same canvas changed hands for about 300 million, roughly 75,000 times what he was paid.
