Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning (Rotterdam 1904 — East Hampton 1997) is one of the most celebrated figures in twentieth-century American art. The work he produced in the forties and fifties makes him a key figure in Abstract Expressionism, the generation that included Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline and Mark Rothko, and that succeeded in making New York the new international art capital after the Second World War. Influenced by Cubism and Surrealism as well as by existentialism and psychoanalysis, these artists sought to exploit the expressive possibilities of gesture and matter, experimenting with dynamic, open forms that they saw as capable of conveying their own temperament and creativity. De Kooning’s career, however, continued until the late eighties and was marked by an alternation of figurative and abstract periods. This rejection of avant-garde dogma, not always well understood at the time, now makes him a highly influential artist. His most frequent subjects were woman and landscape, although in this obsession we should see not so much a desire for representational verisimilitude as an urge to capture something felt and real but not exactly visible. His black paintings of the forties, in which he seemed to liquefy Cubist forms, were considered a perfect image of the dynamism of New York. In the fifties de Kooning made his famous paintings of women, putting an end to the hierarchy that separated figure and background and producing violent images that have the presence and monumentality of certain immemorial representations of goddesses, but that also refer to contemporary women, to Hollywood divas or cheerleaders in American football. In the sixties and seventies de Kooning painted marvellous abstract landscapes that were highly acclaimed by the international painters of the eighties. It was then, in the eighties, that he developed a very refined late style with a simplicity and serenity that can be compared to the work of Matisse, and with a predominance of light and colour and empty, meditative spaces. The exhibition includes about eighty paintings, sculptures and drawings, spanning the period from the late thirties to the late eighties. They include various very well known works, such as Seated Woman, 1940 (Philadelphia Museum of Art); Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point, 1963, and Two Figures in a Landscape, 1967 (both belonging to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam); The Visit, 1967 (Tate Gallery, London); and the series 24 Drawings with Eyes Closed, belonging to the collection of the Museum Overholland, together with other rarely seen drawings. The exhibition has enjoyed the collaboration of numerous international museums and the artist’s heirs. The catalogue, co-produced with the Fundació “la Caixa”, includes essays by Enrique Juncosa, the curator of the exhibition, and by David Carrier and Richard Shiff.