Willem de Kooning is a Dutch-American painter who was born in 1904 at Rotterdam and who first studied art in Amsterdam. He later studied under the avant-garde artist Bernard Romein. He came to the United States in 1926, and his work at the time was conservative and traditional. He soon joined the circle of Arshile Gorky and other artists prominent in the abstract expressionist movement. Under that influence, de Kooning started to experiment in advanced techniques of abstraction derived from Kandinsky and the late Cubism of Picasso.
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:
2. The Depression years and Social Realism;
3. The "release" from politics and the efflorescence of abstract painting in New York in the 1940s; and
4. The consolidation of this phase in the 1950s.
In the 1920s the problem facing the artist was distorted by the naive behavior of the American art world. This was the period when de Kooning arrived in America from Holland, and at that time he began meeting artists who, like himself, were not yet settled. The crisis ...