de Kooning, Willem (1904–1997)

Dutch-born US painter. He emigrated to the USA in 1926 and worked as a commercial artist. After World War II he became, together with Jackson Pollock, one of the leaders of the abstract expressionist movement, although he retained figural images, painted with quick, violent brushstrokes. His Women series, exhibited in 1953, was criticized for its grotesque depictions of women.

As an abstract expressionist, De Kooning sought to create a spontaneous art that could convey emotion directly through the physical qualities of the paint itself – through colour, texture, and intensely worked paint – which was sometimes splashed or smeared across the canvas. He joined the faculty of the Yale Art School and became a member of the National Institute of Arts in 1960. In 1989 his painting Interchange (1955) was sold at Sotheby's, New York, for $20,680,000; the highest price paid at auction for a work by a living artist.

Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam in the Netherlands in 1904. At the early age of 13 he was apprenticed to a firm of commercial artists, studying arts and crafts at night school. He then studied fine art. In 1926 he emigrated to the USA as a stowaway and worked as a house painter in Hoboken, New Jersey. Soon he moved to New York to work as a commercial artist, and it was there, through meeting artists such as Arshile Gorky and Stuart Davis, that his interest in art was given new life. During the Depression of the 1930s, de Kooning, like so many other US artists, worked for the Federal Art Project. His paintings were commissioned for numerous Work Projects Administration (WPA) projects, and he won praise for his mural in the Hall of Pharmacy at the 1939 New York World's Fair. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.