Willem de Kooning

In the 1930s, de Kooning painted in several manners at the same time. He produced portraits and figure studies seemed to suggest the late works of Giacometti. De Kooning stands out from his contemporaries by being the only one to make the human figure, first male and then female, a central theme of his work. The artist also painted sensitive but energetic abstractions, making use of organic and biomorphic forms expressed in a jagged linear counterpoint. At the same time, he did not take much interest in the more fantastic aspects of surrealism as did Gorky and others, and de Kooning took an essentially realistic stance drawing more from Picasso (Osborne, 1980, 150).

Thomas B. Hess sees the works of de Kooning as part of what he calls the crisis of modern art. He says that de Kooning's career developed in an environment that was marked by four changes in four decades, and an oversimplified view describes them as:

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ntil 1948, but even before this his abstractions-- in tones of muted grey with curvilinear shapes and vaguely biomorphic suggestions-- were influential among artists of the New York School beginning in the early 1940s. De Kooning's first exhibition was in 1948 at the Charles Egan Gallery. After this, he shared with Jackson Pollock the unofficial leadership of the group of artists in the so-called Abstract Expressionist, emphasizing the importance of spontaneity and action painting. Among de Kooning's important works of this period were the black paintings with white linear drawings done around 1950, such as Night Square. What set him apart was his organization of space and the expressive energy of his brushstroke (Osborne, 1980, 150). Robert Hughes differentiates between "early" and "late" de Kooning. He finds that when de Kooning arrived in America, he had what few of his colleagues in the 1930s and 1940s in the New York School would have--a thorough, guild-based art training that centered on formal drawing of the figure. As a result, de Kooning's early portraits tended to consolidate an unerring density of structure beneath their tentative-looking, close-toned surfaces. De Kooning's draftsmanship is what gave him a firm
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